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Spock hesitated. Examine the Instrument! Malkus mentally bellowed, and this time the thrall obeyed.

It was odd that the halfbreed had been able to hesitate so. Malkus’s control should have been complete. Perhaps that feedback was worse than he thought….

“There is a flaw,” Spock said, and with the halfbreed’s eyes, Malkus saw that he was correct. There was a small opening in one of the corners of the Instrument, virtually undetectable unless one was actively seeking it out—he was glad he had chosen the halfbreed Vulcan, as his eyesight was superior to that of the two humans or the Bajoran.

Kira had a scanning device in her possession, and Malkus instructed her to use it on the Instrument.

As he had surmised, there was a component missing.

Unfortunately, a scan of DeSoto’s memories showed that the human captain did not know precisely where the Instrument had been found. The best it could be narrowed down to was a particular area of space.

Worse, it was an area of space that was currently politically unstable: on the border between a once-great power that had recently lost a war and a still-great power that had won it.

He had to have the component.

Of the four thralls, Kira was by far the most skilled pilot, and she also knew the region of space well. He instructed her to take one of the conveyances—the one marked with the name St. Lawrence—and travel to that region of space to find the component.

A part of Malkus bridled under the delay, but it was a small part. Patience. That was, and always would be, his greatest asset. He had waited this long, after all. The time it would take Kira to find the last component and complete the Great Rectangle was infinitesimal by comparison.

Soon…

A confusing mass of light and sound assaulted B’Oraq as she regained consciousness. Half-formed noises and blurred images started to slowly coalesce into something she could justifiably interpret as real or familiar—up to and including a dull ache in the top of her skull.

I truly hate being sedated, she thought. The curse of being a physician was that she knew precisely what the drugs did to her and what the potential long-term effects were, so she was hyperaware of the precise damage to her bloodstream—and, thanks to the headache, her cranium—caused by the sedative that Admiral McCoy had given her.

McCoy. It was absurd on the face of it. Why would a century-and-a-half-old human in the middle of a shuttle journey from the base on Tynrok to Qo’noS subdue the doctor who had invited him in the first place?

“Are you all right, Doctor?”

Finally, B’Oraq focused on what it was her eyes told her, especially since she recognized the voice—which matched the face that stood over her prone form, looking vaguely concerned.

“Am—Ambassador Worf?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing here? How did you get on board?” She sat up, which only made her headache worse. She had been lying on the very QongDaq that McCoy had been whining about.

“I do not know,” Worf said. “I was in a runabout en route to Khitomer when Ambassador Spock subdued me with the Vulcan neck attack. I awoke on this shuttle.”

“I need to check on the pilots—” She started to get up from the QongDaq, but Worf put a restraining hand on her shoulder.

“They are both fine—as are my pilots. They are attempting to dismantle the forcefield that surrounds the runabout.”

She got up anyhow, despite the ambassador’s hand. “Where are we?”

“The shuttle’s systems are offline. However, according to the readings we have been able to obtain with hand scanners, we are on Narendra III.”

B’Oraq shook her head in confusion. “Narendra III? Why would McCoy bring us here?”

“I do not know,” Worf repeated.

“Didn’t Spock and McCoy serve together in Starfleet?”

Worf nodded. “For many years on the U.S.S. Enterprise.”

A half-remembered history course came back to her. “And the Enterprise was destroyed at Narendra III. Perhaps this is connected?”

“Unlikely,” Worf said. “The Enterprise that sacrificed itself on this world was not the same one