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He ruled the universe. He could afford to wait.

Aidulac had outperformed even Malkus’s expectations. Using his Instruments, and her team’s other gift of immortality, he had ruled for many ages.

Until he was at last overthrown.

Even then, those who opposed him made one fatal mistake. They had been able to destroy his body, true—though Aidulac had given him the means by which to stave off entropy, he was by no means invulnerable—but first they placed his consciousness within one of the Instruments.

They had thought this would be the worst kind of torture.

They were wrong.

Oh, it was torture, true. To live for so long as nothing but thought was a hellish existence.

But it was still existence. And as long as Malkus lived in some form, he knew he would eventually triumph.

He just needed to wait.

First, he needed someone to colonize the world, as these Klingons finally did. Then they had to unearth the Instrument.

As soon as they did, Malkus was able to reach out to their minds, just as the other shards of his consciousness had done with Tomasina Laubenthal, Orta, and the third being who had been enslaved without Malkus realizing it. But where the mental shadows of Malkus that inhabited the other Instruments were limited in scope, Malkus was whole in this Instrument, and his powers were manifold.

Once he took command of all the minds currently inhabiting the world now called Narendra III, Malkus went further. Eleven minds had been imprinted on Malkus when the other three Instruments shut down. He now reached out to trace those minds….

The first three were Guillermo Masada, Spock of Vulcan, and Leonard McCoy. Masada’s mental trail ended shortly after being imprinted, which meant that he had died in the interim. Malkus was disappointed, but such were the risks. Spock’s seemed to end and then start again, which confused Malkus, but his mental impression was still strong. McCoy’s was also thriving.

Next were Declan Keogh, Joseph Shabalala, Benjamin Sisko, and Kira Nerys. Keogh’s and Shabalala’s trails also ended shortly after imprinting, and Malkus found that Sisko’s trail led to a place he could not go. It was not death—but Sisko’s mind was no longer within Malkus’s purview. However, Kira’s impression was quite strong, and she was as easily enslaved as McCoy and Spock.

The final four were Robert DeSoto, Liliane Weiss, Ellen Hayat, and Dina Voyskunsky—but of them, only DeSoto’s trail did not end. His mind, too, now belonged to Malkus.

Four slaves where once there were eleven. Pity that mortals’lives are so brief.

But it did not matter. Soon, he would once again rule everything.

He gave instructions to his four new slaves….

The bar on Starbase 24 didn’t have any prune juice. It was the perfect ending to what had been a most wretched day for Worf, son of Mogh, former Starfleet lieutenant commander, and current Federation Ambassador to the Klingon Empire.

He dolefully sipped the weak raktajino and looked over the screen of his padd, but the words were starting to blur. He hadn’t slept in almost forty hours. While Klingons did not share the human need for obscene amounts of sleep, he did need to rest eventually. Sadly, he was unlikely to get much chance to do so before the conference on Khitomer started.

In the months since the end of the Dominion War, the three major Alpha Quadrant powers, the United Federation of Planets, the Romulan Star Empire, and the Klingon Empire, had mostly settled down. A few crises had threatened to break the fragile peace, but each had been solved without plunging the quadrant again into war—or out-and-out destruction—and now the three powers felt the need to sit down and determine just what the future of the quadrant would be. So ambassadors from all three governments were going to assemble at Khitomer, a Klingon planet near the borders of the other two powers, in order to try to settle the inevitable differences that had come up: protectorate worlds, former Cardassian planets that were now up for grabs,