The Brave and the Bold Book Two

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  “I don’t get my commission,” Quark said matter-of-factly.

  This time J’lang smiled. “Besides that. Are you familiar with Lieutenant Koth of the Tcha’voth?”

  “Sure.” The Tcha’voth was the Klingon Defense Force ship assigned to the Bajoran sector. “He spends an hour a day in the holosuite killing things after he gets off-shift, and then drinks two mugs of that chech’tluth stuff before heading back to the ship.”

  J’lang’s smile spread into a grin. That certainly sounded like Koth; you didn’t need chronometers on ships he served on, you just had to follow his routine, and you’d know what the time of day was. “He’s also my cousin—a member of my House, and quite happy to rip off your head and spit down your neck if I ask him to do so. Do I make myself perfectly clear, Quark?”

  “Oh, quite clear, yes,” Quark said, nodding quickly and swallowing nervously. “Well, if you’ll excuse me…” The Ferengi cut off the connection.

  Of course, the truth was that J’lang and Koth hadn’t spoken in years. They were only distant cousins, and the sculptor seriously doubted that he could prevail upon the lieutenant to kill a Ferengi on his behalf. But, he thought happily, Quark doesn’t need to know that.

  J’lang turned off his screen and turned to look outside the window of the small, cluttered office. It was part of a prefabricated structure built on this, the smallest continent on Narendra III, meant to be here only as long as it took J’lang’s apprentices to construct the Dominion War Memorial and the workers to put together the other buildings that would accompany it—a restaurant, a museum, and some other things that were of no concern to J’lang.

  The idea had been to honor those who died in battle defending the empire. But what Chancellor Martok had specifically requested was that it honor not just the Klingon dead, but all those who died in service of the fight against the oppressors from the Gamma Quadrant. So J’lang was instructed to build something that would honor not only the Klingon Defense Force, but Starfleet and even the Romulan military.

  J’lang had taken the idea one step further. The memorial would consist of representations of ship captains from each of the three forces—but each would be constructed in a stone from the capital planet of each government.

  The human element was proving to be most problematic. He still hadn’t figured out what pose to put the Starfleet captain in. For the Klingon, he’d chosen a classic pose of standing upright and hoisting a bat’leth over his head. The Romulan would stand in a slight crouch and aim her disruptor forward (and if that made the Romulan stand a bit shorter than the Klingon or the human, J’lang had no real problem with that, and he doubted the chancellor would either). But what to do with the human? Perhaps just standing there with his arms on his hips. Standing around looking foolish is what humans do best, after all….

  Out the window, J’lang could see several Klingons—some civilians, some volunteers from the Defense Force who wanted to aid in the construction of this dedication to their fallen comrades—laying the triceron explosives that would be used to carve out the space for the statues. J’lang had chosen the top of the largest hill on the continent for the memorial’s site. Since the statues would be west-facing, the sun would rise every morning behind the statues, illuminating the figures majestically from behind.

  J’lang smiled. It will be glorious. After this, they’ll be begging me to work on the next statue for the Hall of Warriors. The inductions into the Order of the Bat’leth are soon, and I know they haven’t chosen the sculptor for that yet. If I can pull this off…

  The visions of artistic glory that danced in J’lang’s head were suppressed by the site of the various Klingons moving away from the blast site. Just as they did, his intercom beeped.

  “J’lang,” said the voice of his assistant, Perrih, “we’re about to start the blasting. Do you want to come down to the observation room?”

  “I can see it fine from here, Perrih. Tell Dargh he can blow up the hill whenever he wants.” Dargh was the engineer the local government on Narendra had sent to oversee the mechanical aspects of the memorial. J’lang had found him to be prickly and irritating, with beady little eyes that never looked at the same thing for more than half a second. He seemed to have an endless supply of questions about inconsequential minutae that were not J’lang’s concern as an artist. So he left Perrih to deal with him. That was an assistant’s purpose, after all.

  The alternative was to deal with him directly, which would almost certainly lead to J’lang having to kill Dargh, and the project was already behind schedule as it was….

  Within a few minutes, a most satisfying explosion erupted from the hill as the triceron ripped through the dirt and grass and rock, pulverizing them to their component atoms and spreading them to the wind.

  J’lang had never cared much for explosions—they usually resulted in damaged artwork—but he had to admit to admiring this one. And damn his beady little eyes, but Dargh had done his job superlatively well. When the dust and smoke cleared, J’lang saw a near-perfect L-shaped hole in the hill of just the right size. Oh, the edges would need smoothing, and the surface needed to be flattened and paved, but it was exactly what J’lang needed to start with.

  The other thing he noticed as the smoke cleared was the small black box.

  Then, suddenly, a sharp pain sliced through J’lang’s skull.

  Once, when he was a boy, serving as one of many apprentices to the great sculptor Dolmorr, J’lang had accidentally turned on a welder while it was facing his arm. The white-hot agony that shot through his forearm and wrist was greater than any pain J’lang had thought it was possible to feel. Decades later, he still sometimes felt phantoms of that pain when he closed his eyes.

  The agony he felt now was a thousand times worse than that.

  I AM FREE! AT LAST, AFTER AN ETERNITY OF TORMENT, I AM FREE!

  The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It only increased the pain in J’lang’s skull.

  Suddenly, the pain vanished. And with it, most of his other senses. He could no longer feel his body around him, no longer hear the hum of the generator that kept power in the prefabricated structure, no longer smell the plate of racht and bowl of grapok sauce that he’d abandoned an hour ago but never disposed of.

  He could still see, however. And what he saw was the black box. He could not control his movements, so he could not take his eyes off it.

  Then, minutes later, he saw several Klingons moving as one—indeed, moving in more perfect formation than any soldiers J’lang had ever seen—toward that black box.

  And all J’lang could think was that the project was about to fall considerably further behind….

  Patience. That had always been Malkus’s watchword. He knew that all he needed to do was not rush anything, and it would come to him. Pressure brought sloppiness. When rebels started agitating on Alphramick, he simply waited for them to make a mistake. True, there was a cost in the lives of his soldiers, but they had already pledged their lives to Malkus, and he could always get new ones. But, by waiting, the rebels exposed themselves for the disorganized fools they were, and Malkus was able to crush them far more spectacularly than he would have had he rushed things.

  When he had Aidulac supervise the creation of his Instruments, he did not give her any kind of deadline. He knew that in order for her to truly accomplish what he wanted, he needed to give her all the time and all the resources she needed.

  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, relief efforts throughout the quadrant, exacting reparations from the Breen, and a great deal more.

  Worf, as the ambassador to Qo’noS and a Klingon who had lived most of his life within the Federation, had been one of many diplomats invited to attend, given his unique perspective on both governments.

  Before he left Qo’noS, though, several matters had demanded his immediate attention. He had to sign off on the latest reports from Emperor Vall on taD, look over the fifth draft of the resolution between the Klingon Empire and the Tholian Assembly regarding the incident on Traelus II, approve half a dozen visas, read over an application from a Bolian opera company to tour the Empire, and several other niggling matters that had all started to blend in Worf’s head.

  Then he was informed that the Defense Force vessel that was supposed to convey him to the conference had been detained by an emergency. Worf’s aide, Giancarlo Wu, had managed to get a Starfleet vessel to divert to the Klingon Homeworld. It couldn’t go to Khitomer, but could at least drop him off at Starbase 24, which was only a few hours away by shuttle. Given that it was the nearest Federation base to Khitomer, Worf was sure he’d be able to get a ride from there.

  Then another crisis reared its head, involving some Tellarites who had managed to get themselves arrested on Mempa V. It was the sort of trivial stupidity that Worf was usually happy to fob off on Wu, and indeed he did so this time as well—but it meant that Wu would not be able to accompany him to Khitomer. Worf had been ambassador for four months, and he was quite sure that he would have committed several dozen homicides by now if it hadn’t been for Wu’s organizational skills, cool head, and ability to deal with irritating minutiae.

  So Wu went off to Mempa and Worf boarded the U.S.S. Musgrave, a Saber-class ship that was rather small and had no guest quarters. For an eighteen-hour trip that was going through the ship’s alpha and beta shifts, this probably didn’t seem an issue to the Musgrave’ s captain—a polite, if terse, human named Manolet Dayrit—but Worf had been hoping to take advantage of the opportunity to catch up on sleep. Instead, Captain Dayrit installed him in the conference lounge, and he spent the time catching up on paperwork.

  On arrival at Starbase 24, Dayrit informed him that a runabout, the St. Lawrence, was already scheduled to take one ambassador to Khitomer, and they could take Worf as well. He still had an hour, so he headed for the bar hoping for a prune juice to settle him down.

  Then again, his last trip to Khitomer had not gone as planned, either.

  “Attention, Ambassador Worf. Please report to Landing Pad F. Ambassador Worf to Landing Pad F, please.”

  Finally, he thought. He drained the rest of his raktajino, placed the padd in his jacket pocket, and strode out of the bar.

  As he walked purposefully down the corridor toward the landing pad, a voice sounded out from behind him. “My goodness, if it isn’t Mr. Woof!”

  Worf felt a knot tie in his left stomach. Not her, he thought. Please let that have been my imagination.

  No such luck. Worf stopped walking and turned around to see Lwaxana Troi, daughter of the Fifth House, Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed, and general bane of Worf’s existence. For a time, Worf had pursued a relationship with Deanna Troi, one of his crewmates on the U.S.S. Enterprise and Lwaxana’s daughter. That relationship had eventually ended, and one of the many benefits to that was that there was no danger of this woman becoming Worf’s mother-in-law.

  As always, Lwaxana was overdressed. Worf wore a simple brown tunic, black pants and boots, and a thick, ankle-length black leather coat decorated with both the Klingon and Federation insignias, in which he hid several weapons. Lwaxana, on the other hand, wore un elaborate fuchsia dress with numerous buttons and fastenings that probably took her hours to get into. The dress was decorated with a blue flower pattern—it gave Worf a headache just to look at it. Her hair was equally elaborate, held in an unnatural pattern with a variety of pins. The grooming rituals of most Federation races had always been incomprehensible to Worf, but he found ones involving hair to be especially ludicrous. Tying his own hair into a ponytail was as far as he was willing to go to accede to that custom. Lwaxana, of course, as with everything else, took it to an absurd extreme.

  Bowing to the inevitable, Worf allowed Lwaxana to catch up. I might as well get this over with, he thought glumly. Like most Betazoids, Lwaxana was a telepath, so she probably picked up that thought, but Worf found himself unable to be too concerned with that. His negative thoughts had never even slowed her down in the past.

  “What a pleasant surprise to see you here.�
� Lwaxana hooked her arm into Worf’s and led him onward down the corridor.

  “Thank you,” Worf said, not meaning it, and looking at the arm as if it were a poisonous snake.

  “So, Woof, you’re an ambassador now. I guess we’ll be seeing a lot more of each other at diplomatic functions like this conference on Khitomer.”

  “It would appear so,” Worf said neutrally, long since having given up correcting Lwaxana’s perpetual mispronunciation of his name. For lack of anything better to say, he asked, “How is your son?”

  “Doing as well as possible, under the circumstances,” Lwaxana said, with a notable dimming of enthusiasm. Betazed had been conquered by the Dominion during the war. In fact, both Lwaxana and Worf had both been involved in the planet’s liberation a little over a year ago—Worf had commanded the U.S.S. Defiant, one of the Starfleet ships involved in the mission, and Lwaxana had led the Betazoid resistance movement—though they did not encounter each other then.

  “How is the rebuilding progressing?” he asked.

  “Slowly. I just came from Earth, actually, and had a talk with the Federation Council about it. I spent two days wrangling with Minister al-Rashan and a tiresome little Cardassian who’s trying to get the Federation to commit more resources to Cardassia than to Betazed! Can you believe it?”

  “No,” Worf said truthfully. Cardassia was the enemy. Betazed was part of the Federation, and deserved consideration before a foe.

  “Neither did I. But this Eli Gark person, or whatever his name is, he’s a sneaky one,” Lwaxana said, not concealing her annoyance.

  Worf started. “You mean Elim Garak?”

  “Don’t tell me you know the little toad?”

  Hiding a small smile, Worf said, “Oh yes.”And, he thought, if ever two people deserved each other, it is Garak and Lwaxana.

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, Mr. Woof,” Lwaxana said testily.

  Worf suppressed a growl.

  There was an uncomfortable silence as they continued down the corridor. Worf was not looking forward to the next few hours. He doubted he would be able to contrive an excuse to use the St. Lawrence’ s aft compartment to grab a quick nap—not with Lwaxana accompanying him.