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He felt around for something on his person that he could use to wedge between the doors, but he carried no blade, and Worf had taken his disruptor and his communications device.

Looking around the room, Kl’rt saw nothing but blank walls and an empty floor. There didn’t even appear to be a mote of dust.

This is worse than torture, and reveals you as lower than the Lubbockian slime devil we all thought you to be, Worf. You should pray that I die down here, for if I live, I will not rest until you are dead at my feet.

The sounds of Kl’rt pounding on the turbolift doors faded as Worf climbed back up the shaft away from the sub-subbasement. In order to implement his plan of attack, he needed to be far away from the sensor-resistant walls of the lower floor. Though the space had been cleared of everything—even the interior walls—whatever was in the walls, floor, and ceiling that kept the secret room literally off the radar still interfered with tricorder readings. He needed to be able to screen out specific life-forms if his plan was to work.

Once he reached the fifth floor, just under where the shaft forked into a second shaft for the east side of the building, he paused, hooked his right arm around one of the ladder’s rungs, and removed the tricorder from his pocket with his left hand.

From what he’d overheard on Klahb’s communications channel, one of the Starfleet security guards assigned to the embassy was also still at large. Worf needed to locate that guard first.

He screened out the conference room from the tricorder’s scan. That was the last place he could go right now; all the hostages were there, and it was the most heavily defended room. I need to engage in guerrilla tactics to win this battle, he thought, and that means avoiding the heart until all the extremities have been cut off and are bleeding.

Once that was done, he scanned for life-forms in the rest of the embassy. The first thing he noted was that the subbasement was clear. That space Worf knew about, not because he was ambassador but because his position as head of strategic operations for the Bajoran sector and later as fleet liaison between Starfleet and the Defense Force during the war gave him clearance to be aware of the floor’s existence. Worf wasn’t surprised to see that it was empty, as it explained the faces among the hostages he saw that he didn’t recognize, but he was disheartened, as it meant that Vark and Rov had found out about the subbasement’s existence, which pointed to a leak in security.

Then again, this entire operation points to a leak in security. One that I intend to plug.

In addition to housing several top-secret operations and data, the subbasement was also where the embassy’s main computer was kept. That meant that whoever had locked out the security system—based on what Worf had overheard, that was someone named Torvak—was doing so remotely. That provides one option on how to disengage the security lockout.

The other life-forms he detected were two Klingons moving on the third floor, two more moving on the fifth—and rapidly approaching Worf’s position—and another two on the seventh. Probably roving patrols trying to find myself and the guard. Three more Klingons were stationary on the eighth floor, two on the west side of the floor, the third on the east.

Rov’s voice sounded on the comm. “Torvak, report.” A pause, then: “Torvak, report!”

A moment later, two more Klingons “appeared” moving toward the emergency ladder access on the top floor. It seems Rov and another of his people will be getting Torvak’s report in person.

The only other life-form Worf read was that of a human, inside one of the guest bedrooms on the sixth floor. Assuming that was the missing guard, he or she was in no immediate danger, leaving Worf to go after the two most valuable members of Klahb, who were about to be in the same place: Rov, the ringleader, and Torvak, the one who had disabled the security system.

He put the tricorder back in his pocket and unhooked