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“Quiet! Get up very casually and walk to the side of the square. Move into the crowd. Leave me to deal with them.”

“Forget it. This is my mission, too. I’m not leaving you here all by yourself. Even a gorilla like you needs a little backup.”

“Then sit still. Sit very still. Whatever happens, do not be moved.”

He felt the eyes of Odette Khanty and her guards. The Cafe D’Atraq was in the middle of the city square, and he knew she would not notice him as long as he and Grant did not get up. All the natives were clearing a path, tightening into the sides of the square to allow her and her elite team of Klingon guards to pass through.

This place, this planet and its townships, was a tapestry woven of the Oriental Express and the American Old West. With a transplanted populace of Greeks, Turks, Lebanese, Armenians, Assyrians, Tuscans, and Moors, Sindikash bore a decidedly Gothic atmosphere. The planet’s buildings were frontierish, its prevailing spirit exotic, and Worf and Grant were two outworlders in a place that knew its identity.

Watching Mrs. Khanty and her hooded guards move toward them under the tiled arches of the mosquelike square, Worf and Grant were now alone in a deserted cafe, while dozens of people eyed them from the sides of the square. All others had moved politely aside.

The woman touched the front of her pink suit to make sure it was perfectly presentable, then fingered the silk Paisley scarf neatly pinned at her neck. Her dark blond hair had been put perfectly in place, though it appeared to be casual; straight but thick, curved under slightly at the bottom, just above her shoulders. Just right. Feminine, yet efficient. Worf knew about her—she was not born to the place with which she had become so unbreakably associated. She saw herself as having earned her position.

Anger bled into Worf’s heart as the eyes of the guards, the Rogues, fixed upon him and he felt their animosity.

Klingons. They really were Klingons! Every one of them was a Klingon!

Khanty nodded to her vanguard to keep moving forward in spite of Worf blocking their path.

Klingons. Klingons in service to a human. A human woman. A woman criminal.

What kind of Klingons …

He knew Commissioner Toledano wasn’t lying, and Worf had expected Klingons, yet until this moment he had been hoping that the perpetrators of such atrocities were not just Klingons. Perhaps dregs had been dug up from all sorts of cultures across space, and Starfleet Intelligence had mentioned only the Klingons because Klingons were so visibly different from most humanoids. Perhaps that.

But now, as he looked at Mrs. Khanty’s Rogues, as they were known on Sindikash, he saw that this was a pack of Klingons and only Klingons, a pack who had simply rejected anything Klingons are supposed to think about right and wrong, not here because of any sense of honorable conquest, duty, family loyalty, or anything else Klingons might be motivated by. These had just thrown all that away, cast off centuries of attachment to the things that held a culture together. These Klingons were destructively pursuing personal power, rather than acting in some way that would hold society, even Klingon society, together. Profit and gain could be pursued in a way that strengthened culture, but these Klingons wanted to go around those rules and achieve through the basest acts of brutality and opportunism.

Scum. Nothing. He was looking at empty hoods. Empty!

“Ugulan.” Mrs. Khanty’s voice sounded in the quiet square as she spoke quietly to the sergeant of her guard. “The Klingon.”

“Yes, Mrs. Khanty.” As if he didn’t notice that he himself was Klingon and so were all his men, Ugulan motioned for his men to halt, but they remained in formation around her.

Then Ugulan himself stepped forward, his face deeply shaded by the purple hood. He moved through the empty tables to the one where Worf sat defiantly. With his purple hood and the dagger at his belt, he was effectively threatening.

“You will stand