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Then she decided that she was too old for such pranks. Besides, much as she hated to admit it, she missed Aaron Cavit, and wouldn’t mind finding out what he’d been up to.

“Computer, reply to message from Lieutenant Commander Cavit. Simple text message: It’s a date.”

Aidulac piloted the Sun through the Demilitarized Zone.

For the third time, she had failed. Again, Starfleet had managed to get there before her. She had no idea how or why the Hood had been able to enter the DMZ unmolested, but there it was.

At least her biggest fear—that the people who found the Instruments would use them to re-create Malkus’s tyranny—were unfounded. Starfleet had, at least, managed to confiscate the Instruments before the damage they did was too extensive. Given the number of people Malkus killed during his reign, the paltry few who died on Alpha Proxima II, Bajor’s moon, Nramia, and Slaybis IV were minor.

Still, the most dangerous Instrument was still out there. Somewhere. And Aidulac was quite sure that the last would prove to be by far the most dangerous.

Especially if her suspicions were true.

The one thing that was different this time was that the Instrument had been moved from where it was found. She had never been able to examine the sites on Proxima or the Bajoran moon.

But she was able to backtrack to where, precisely, the Maquis had found the third Instrument—a moon surrounding a gas giant in the Grovran system.

The Sun pulled into orbit around the moon. Her scanners showed her a most uninteresting world: rocks, vegetation, more rocks. A pang hit her as she realized that it was much like the planetoid where she had lived before Malkus took her away to have her supervise the creation of the Instruments. Like that long-dead planetoid, this moon was of no interest or consequence to anyone. That was why she had chosen the planetoid then, and also no doubt why the rebels chose this moon as a place to dispose of the Instrument.

The only thing to mar the landscape was the wreckage of a shuttlecraft.

She landed the Sun near that wreckage. A fierce wind blew through Aidulac’s hair as she stepped out, but she paid it no heed. Instead, she checked the scanner she had built into her forearm, and found an area of ground that had a higher heat index than it should.

Approaching it, she found that the area had been fired upon by some kind of directed energy weapon. It was also the spot to which the trail of the Instrument led.

Her scanner found something else, as well. It was buried beneath the rock, and Aidulac needed to use her own weapon—a laser she had convinced a friend to give her years ago—to cut through the rock to get to it.

The component was small—probably too small for most eyes to see—and green and it glowed slightly. Aidulac recognized it as easily as she would have recognized a piece of her own flesh.

A segment from the weather controller.

Even her own work was subject to the ravages of entropy, it seemed. The component was a minor one, but it probably affected the Instruments’ability to interconnect.

For the first time in ninety thousand years, Aidulac smiled.

She placed the component in a pocket of her jumpsuit and walked back to the Sun. For the first time, she retrieved a part of her legacy. Now it was just a matter of waiting for the final act to start.

The third planet in the Narendra system had been part of the Zalkat Union once. It was called Horbin then, and it had been used as parkland. Few visited the world, and the parkland fell into disuse. It was an inconsequential part of the Union—which was why, when the rebels overthrew Malkus the Mighty, they chose this as one of the places to hide one of the Instruments of his rule. After all, why would anyone wish to come to this place?

After the fall of the Union, it lay unoccupied for many millennia. Until the Klingons came and put a base there.

Decades passed. The planet that one government had made into an uninteresting parkland had been transformed by another into a thriving colony. Dozens of cities had been built, many thousands