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Interesting, but disturbing news.

It was impossible for Sub-Commander Sela to look into a mirror and not see her mother Tasha Yar. Hardly surprising since she could've been mistaken for a younger twin sister by any of her mother's former Starfleet comrades. Sela had the same shade of blond hair like Tasha - an unusual color for a Romulan - the same lithe body and she had inherited the strength of both her parents. But where her mother was a weak human, she was a proud Romulan, with the strength of their ancestors. By tradition, and bigotry, the Romulans worked hard to keep their heritage suppressed. If those in the Senate and the Romulan military had their way then Romulan history would've been rewritten and purged of all knowledge of Vulcan. Unfortunately, there was no way that could happen; there were too many artifacts and historical records dating back to the separation and the journey across interstellar space towards Romulus to found the Empire.

Personally Sela didn't really care about the murky sides to Vulcan and Romulan history; to her, the strong had left Vulcan to use their violent emotions to carve an Empire, that was true control. Why hide their origins in such a way? That was one of the reasons Sela was not afraid to hide her human heritage. Sela had always stood out during her school days because of her blond hair, and she had endured the bullying and bigotry that had come with it because she had sworn to herself that she was as Romulan as they were, and that one day she would prove it. Sela had worked long and hard with her fathers' endorsement to enter the military, and eventually the Tal Shiar. A slow sadistic smile crossed her face as she mused on her rise through the Tal Shiar; many citizens hated and feared it, but the Tal Shiar did a great service for the Empire whether the military liked it or not, and it was incredibly easy for Sela to use it to persecute and punish those who had persecuted her for being half human.

But she and her father would never forgive or forget Tasha Yar, and as Sela had grown up she had even more reason to curse her mother. But that didn't stop Sela from wondering about the amazing and frankly bizarre manner in which she had been conceived.

It all came down from the battle of Narendra 3 and the intervention of the Enterprise C. At the time of the battle, the Klingon-Romulan alliance had been in a mess due to the cultural differences that had grown over the years since the successful exchanges in technologies which had seen the Romulan Star Empire gain more advanced ship designs and warp technology whilst the Romulans handed the Klingons the valuable Cloaking technology. Such an alliance and an exchange of technologies had drastically shifted the balance of power throughout the Quadrant, but it had been worth it in the long run. The Romulan Star Empire had grown in power, and with access to Klingon technology (much of it was derived from their conquests, but that didn't matter), which in some ways was more sophisticated than Romulan technology at the time.

Many people would say that Klingons would balk at the thought of being invisible in order to sneak up on an enemy, but truthfully the Klingons didn't really care about the how they achieved victory so long as they succeeded. Cloaking technology gave them a massive advantage over their enemies, especially the Federation.

But like all things it didn't end. It all came down to the methods used by the two species rather than anything else. The Romulans preferred the working behind the scenes approach, it was a side effect of leaving the former homeworld of Vulcan in primitive spaceships and having very rudimentary subspace technologies to work with. As a result the Romulans preferred trickery to fight their battles for them.

Unfortunately the Klingons were the opposite even if they sometimes pursued the practice of sneaking up unseen on an enemy. They were a race of savages in Sela's, and many other Romulans', opinions, they were always storming off into battle without a care or giving any thought of using their natural intelligence. As the years had passed and the two races had been forced to work together, their differences and the cultural divide simply worsened. There were also the minor skirmishes between the two races whenever tensions had risen, but the alliance had held. At least until the Klingons started viewing Romulans on the whole as cowardly and without honor.

Sela sneered at the word. The Klingons didn't care about honor so long as there was victory in a war, so it shouldn't really matter, and continued thinking about the surprise attack which her people had launched against the Klingons. In some regards the attack had done little good and far more harm for the long term plans the Tal Shiar and the Romulan senate had had for the Klingons. There had always been an ambition to rule the Klingon Empire and use them to do the dirty work of the Romulans.

That plan was in tatters now, but Sela had ideas on how to make them work to the advantage of the Romulans. The good news was there were many Klingons who hated the alliance their people had with the Federation and wanted to change the balance of power forever. The members of the House of Duras were exactly what the Romulans needed. If only events like Narendra 3 and Khitomer hadn't occurred, but it was Narendra 3 that Sela's murky history was of any interest. The battle of Narendra 3 had been fought with 4 Romulan warbirds, and they had sufficiently managed to bring the poorly defended Klingon planet to its knees. The Klingons had tried to fight back, but the Romulans had given them no quarter. It hadn't taken long for the Klingons to start to lose the battle, and in their desperation they had sent a distress call. The Klingons may have been brave but even they weren't that fanatical enough to believe they could beat the odds with nothing. It was like fighting a nuclear war with one side only armed with sticks and stones.

And the Enterprise C had arrived to respond.

But something had happened. In a battle against a single or maybe even 2 Romulan warbirds, the Enterprise C may have stood a chance of destroying them, but not against the odds its made at Narendra 3. Yes, they'd managed to inflict serious damage and one warbird was even destroyed, but the Enterprise C had lost the battle.

Sela closed her eyes, leaning back into her hard but surprisingly very comfortable chair at her desk. Official records - Romulan, Klingon and Starfleet - said clearly the Enterprise C had been destroyed. But Sela and a handful of others knew it was not true. Time travel had long since been proven, even if the Vulcan Science Directorate had said it was impossible, but that was typical of the Vulcans. Look into a concept and if they couldn't prove it at once, it must be impossible. But it wasn't. There were phenomena in space that could send a ship into the past. Faster than light travel was one of the most difficult sciences a species could pioneer and that came down to the theory of relativity where time dilation took place, a portal that could transport people millions of centuries ahead into the future.

No, time travel was possible, and the Enterprise C had travelled into the future. The energy exchange during the battle had somehow created a temporal rift. It had been unstable and from what she had heard, it could have collapsed at any time. But it had been enough for the Enterprise C to travel 20 years into the future. Whilst it was there, battle damaged, systems barely responsive, warp drive gone and most of the crew killed, the Enterprise C had encountered its successor, the Galaxy class Enterprise D. History had been altered, the Federation was embroiled in a long, bitter and bloody war with the Klingons. That hadn't surprised Sela when she had been old enough to process the story; the Klingons had always spoiled for a fight, and the Tal Shiar had learnt very quickly when the Enterprise NX-01 had taken that Klingon messenger back to Qo'nos that the High Council had not appreciated the gesture.

Things had spiraled out of control from then, worsened by the small encounters between the NX-01 and the Empire - that mess with the ancestor of the Duras family, the Augment crisis (which had interested the Romulans because of the possibilities of genetic manipulation, though they wouldn't be stupid enough to repeat the human mistakes, but any chance to be better would always be embraced), and the crisis which had caused much of the population of the Empire to lose their cranial ridges, and the creation of the Federation hadn't helped.

At the time of the Battle of Narendra 3 the Federation and the Empire were negotiating a peace treaty, but tensions were still high, and anything could've happened to trigger a war no matter what kind of diplomatic overtures were made, but whatever it had been that caused the war witnessed by the Enterprise C's crew and fought by the Enterprise D, Sela could only guess. Maybe the Klingons had heard that Starfleet had despatched a ship, and were furious they hadn't kept their word and arrived? That was one possibility and would fit in with the typical and average Klingon mentality and obsession with honor, but Sela had long since stopped caring. All that mattered was the Enterprise D helped the crew of its predecessor and sent them back - with Tasha Yar as an additional crewman. They'd returned to the battle, and the Enterprise C's intervention prevented the war.

Sela closed her eyes again as she mused about the consequences of that intervention. The Klingons hadn't just not noticed - they'd arrived at the battle scene, found the weapons signature of a Starfleet ship and the Romulan warbird remains. They had quickly realised the Enterprise C had protected their people in a battle that was not their business, and being an enemy themselves had no reason to fight against impossible odds. The Klingons had seen the sacrifice of the crew of that Starfleet ship as both glorious and honorable. With that the Klingon Empire started opening up to the idea of peace with the Federation, and the further persecution of the Romulans.

But that was not the end of the story, not as far as Tasha Yar was concerned. There had been survivors of the Enterprise, Tasha Yar amongst them and one of the few to have survived, and they had been taken back to Romulan space. They had been scheduled for execution after the interrogation, when a Romulan general took a liking to her. They made a deal - she would become his consort and he would allow them to be spared.

Sela had been born a year later. A slow smile graced her face at that moment - she had loved her mother and she had been loved in return - but one night, when Sela had been a four year old, Tasha had tried to escape. Sela had been bundled up and told to be kept quiet, but the little girl had realised what was going on, and she raised the alarm. Sela, a four year old, had witnessed her own mother's execution, and she would never, ever forget the look on her mother's face. After that Sela had realised what she was after four years of wondering, but that day had made her aware of who and what she was.

Romulan. Her human blood made her difference, and that was why she had never changed her hair color. She wanted a reason to hate her mother, hate her other species. It was what stoked the fire. And she had worked hard to become a member of the military, and later the Tal Shiar. People feared and hated her, but that was alright as far as Sela was concerned. She wanted to be hated and feared, and remembered for that fear. The Tal Shiar did not forget those who made a name for themselves, and Sela planned to make a name for herself. She would make herself better than her mother. She must be better than her mother.

The door chimed and Sela was broken from her thoughts as she concentrated on the progress Duras was having strengthening the power base that his helpful but incredibly stupid family were building that would funnel Romulan influence into the Klingon Empire. It would soon be ready for their plans, but there was still a long way to go, but as long as Duras kept his head and didn't act before they were ready the plan would be easy to put forwards in a year or so.

"Enter," she called, and one of her aides walked in carrying a padd. "What is it?" she asked as he approached.

"We have just intercepted a communique from the Federation ship Enterprise," the aide reported and silently handed the padd over to Sela, who took it just as silently. On the surface this seemed routine since it was the duty of the Tal Shiar to monitor the enemies of the empire and make projections of possible and potential conflicts, but it wasn't since Sela had used her influence to specifically monitor the activities of her mother's ship.

Sela had studied temporal theory long enough to know that the version of Tasha Yar on board the Enterprise had not grown up the same way as the Tasha Yar who had carried and raised her, but she knew eventually Jean Luc Picard would eventually find the temporal rift which would eject the Enterprise C into the present day, and Sela would always be a result.

Sela had to focus on the padd - and she instantly sat up straight when her trained eyes skimmed the report. She looked coldly into the face of her aide, who gulped slightly at the look on her face. "Thank you for bringing this to me," she said surprising him with her generous nod. "You may go."

The aide didn't need to be told twice. He hurriedly left the room, surprised he was still alive. Sela smiled after him - she actually liked the aide, and wasn't going to order his death. Well, not for the moment.

She sighed as she looked down at the padd again. This was unexpected. Tasha Yar was dead, killed by a hostile enemy on a remote planet, and Captain Picard had recommended the planet be isolated because of the dangerous unpredictability of the same entity. That didn't matter to Sela - she didn't care if there was an entity on a planet light years away from Romulus, though the Senate would probably decide not to investigate it; the Federation was arrogant to believe they were the only ones to encounter entities. The Romulan Empire had encountered life forms more dangerous than others. It was only Romulan vigilance that kept them alive, rather than the eyes open naiveté of the Federation.

But reading about her mothers' death... Sela had always imagined her mother to have been with the Enterprise D when the ship encountered the rift, and subsequently changed with the rest of the crew, but if she had been sent back wouldn't she not have been on the Enterprise D when time had reset? Sela shook her head and closed her eyes to get rid of the nasty headache that was forming. Another idea came to her mind; her mother had told her stories of the Klingon-Federation war, so if there was no war then didn't that mean Tasha Yar would've met her end at the hands of an entity? But if there was a war there would be no time for any exploration, only military missions.

She might have worked out a bit of the theory, but time travel and causality really did give her a nasty headache. As she continued to read the report she learnt that Worf, the Klingon on board the ship, was now Chief of Security. Sela had only heard of Worf when she had studied the reports of the Enterprise's earlier missions, and her mother had never mentioned him but that was far from surprising. The Federation had been fighting a war with the Klingons, and apart from the odd intelligence mission the Klingons most likely to encounter Starfleet during a conflict would be on the front lines.

Sela sighed as she looked down at the padd. She hadn't expected this, it had never occurred to her this would happen, or that it could happen. She was about to put the padd down on her desk when a thought occurred to her.

Hadn't Tasha told her that she was on the Enterprise C because someone who happened to know what the real timeline was supposed to hold knew she had died, and that she had only been on that doomed ship because the Captain had been killed and her superior tactical knowledge would be a benefit?

That part of the story had almost been forgotten by Sela because her mother had been talking whilst she'd been falling asleep in bed, and it hadn't really registered in her mind at the time. It had been buried in her mind for years, and now it was out.

Well, that put a new twist on this one, she mused. But it would have been a pity; she had long since wanted to meet her mother in this timeline after the mess the temporal rift had made, wanted to savor the look of surprise on her face before seeing her reaction to finding out in another timeline she'd become nothing more than a sex toy to an amorous Romulan general. That would've been worth a whole years work to her to see how she'd react to that little bit, but unfortunately she would have to live with the disappointment it would not happen. Sela had grown out of the childish stamp you feet if you don't something you wanted stage, it didn't help anyway.

Still at least the Enterprise D's crew were still alive, and that would have to do for when they finally became aware of her presence. And she had every hope to believe they would know about her, if she had her way. Tasha Yar had given birth to her, but this version that had just died wasn't her, and now she was sure about the circumstances she was certain the Enterprise would soon meet its predecessor at the rift in a year or so from now. Then she would be born.

In the meantime, she would monitor the Enterprise, use the Empire and the Tal Shiar resources to undermine their missions without them thinking the Romulans had anything to do with it all before they would finally meet.

Sela was looking forwards to that encounter. It would be the closest she would get to seeing her mother's expression, and that would have to do. All she needed was the right circumstance.

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