Star Trek: ALL - Seven Deadly Sins (15 page)

“You see, like yourselves, we—I mean, my friends and I—have had our disagreements with those irritating creatures who inhabit the Urwyzden system.” He took a sip of his drink. “Oh, wait, I’m sorry, did I say ’disagreements with irritating creatures’? I’m always doing that.” He laughed lightly. “I meant to say that the sooner those
SOUL-SUCKING MOTHER-CREDITORS ARE ALL DISEMBOWELED AND SERVED TO THE SLUG FARMS, THE HAPPIER I’LL BE!”
He took a long, shuddering breath, and a drink to soothe his undoubtedly strained throat. “Sorry.”

Brunt’s ears were still ringing, but he knew better than to be less than respectful to someone who could kill him—or worse, bankrupt him—on a whim. “You are clearly a man of great feeling.”

“That he is,” Gaila agreed. “And it’s so understandable.”

“We have had dealings with the Urwyzden before,” Blud admitted. “Well, when I say ’had dealings,’ I mean we’ve offered to have dealings with them, and they’ve replied by insulting me. I sent the prime ministers of all three planets a hundred bars of gold-pressed latinum each. They sent it back. I killed their best friends, and they actually had the gall to complain to Grand Nagus Zek. This was a couple of years ago.

“So, if you’re going to make a profit out of them, I’m willing to invest, for a forty percent cut of the dividends.” Blud held up a hand to stave off any haggling. “Don’t try to negotiate. I like you, and I hate having to disembowel people I like. But it doesn’t stop me doing so.”

“Forty percent,” Gaila echoed, mortified.

“I’m glad you agree. Now, enjoy your drinks, and then go and show those twisted little dwarves what a real financial power can do. We’ll teach them a lesson about messing with the Ferengi!”

The same procedure as at Kalanis Major?” Brunt asked.

“Same procedure as every deal,” Gaila confirmed. Daimon Blud had arranged the rental—at a surprisingly reasonable rate—of a holoship, a vessel dedicated to holosuites for training purposes. This smaller vessel had been slaved to the
Golden Handshake
’s helm. Brunt and Gaila walked through the empty holodecks. “The prime ministers of Urwyzden Alpha, Beta, and Gamma will be brought here in that order. They’ve already had deliveries of their drones, but we can use an inspection tour for each as an excuse to make our pitches.”

“Let’s hope Bijon knows to wait between appointments this time.”

“Just to be sure,” Gaila said grimly, “I’ve made the arrangements for three different days. And to be doubly sure, one of Lok’s troops will beam them directly to the holoship.”

As they walked, Voloczin stretched his tentacles down and descended from the hologrid. “How does it look?” Gaila asked.

“Like gold-pressed latinum,” Voloczin said cheerily. “All the goodies on offer to each bunch are detectable by sensors we can sell to the other. I gave each planet’s gear a different casing and color.”

“Perfect. Let’s do it.”

“I think I’ll stay a moment,” Brunt said, “and get a feel for our products.”

“You’ll enjoy them, I’m sure,” Gaila promised. With that, he called back to Lok, and he and Voloczin beamed away.

Left alone, Brunt selected a Klingon disruptor and hefted it. The last time he had held a weapon in anger, things had not gone well. There had been Jem’Hadar then, and a Vorta, and he had intended to fight. Well, more accurately he had intended to escape, but if that meant shooting a few Jem’Hadar, then that was what he would have had to do.

It had all been the fault of Quark’s family, of course. His mother had let herself get captured by the Dominion, and Brunt had been willing to help rescue her for a share of fifty bars of gold-pressed latinum. Except that this had been on Quark’s promise, and that was hardly trustworthy. It had even been Quark’s fault that Brunt’s own star had sunk so low that he had had to accept such a demeaning job just to hope to earn some profit.

At least Gaila had, on that occasion, proved himself the most redeemed of Quark’s family, by trying to shoot Quark. Sadly, he had not proved himself any more competent than the rest of Quark’s discount-rate kin.

It always came back to Quark, Brunt thought. Quark’s schemes, and Quark’s impossible luck that haunted Brunt and drove him to penury. If only it had been Brunt who had been quick enough to fire a shot at Quark on Empok Nor. The loathsome welcher would have been as overcooked as hew-mon food.

Looking at the holographic target, Brunt didn’t even see it as a circular targeting matrix. It was Quark’s smug, leering face! He blasted it. Immediately another target was generated; Brunt saw Quark again, and was only too happy to oblige by firing again. Two more targets flashed in from the flanks. Rom’s and Nog’s faces spun wildly across the room, but Brunt got them both with a single shot each. And then there was Zek … Yes, sure enough, he could see Zek’s wrinkled jowls laughing at him on the surface of the next target globe, and he smoothed them out with a disruptor beam right between the beady little eyes.

“Simulation complete,”
a computerized voice stated mildly. Brunt was surprised, and looked down at the rifle in his hands. He had
actually enjoyed that, he realized, and much more than he had expected to.

“You’re a good shot,” Pel said from behind him. He jumped, almost dropping the disruptor. “I don’t think I could have hit all of those target globes, especially not those last two.”

Brunt was rather impressed himself; he hadn’t expected to hit them all either. He wasn’t going to tell her that, of course. There was always more profit in keeping your assets or debits secret and letting others draw their own conclusions. “It’s just about hitting what you see,” he said truthfully, and with not a little relish.

“I could see the targets, but . . .”

“Let’s just say I have good motivation.”

“I could never do that.”

“But you must have good hand-eye coordination to be a pilot?” If not, Brunt thought, he would never step into the group’s ship again until they got a new pilot.

“That’s true. It just feels different flying a ship, though. You’re not pointing at something; you’re having your whole self carried along. It’s like you’re using your whole body.” Brunt tried not to think about her whole body. It was difficult, what with its being so temptingly clothed and therefore invitingly mysterious. “I don’t like those Breen that Gaila has taken up with.”

“I know what you mean,” Brunt agreed. “Dominion soldiers. At least with a Jem’Hadar you could see his face, and what he was thinking.”

“You’ve met Jem’Hadar?” Pel asked admiringly.

“Yes,” Brunt admitted. He decided not to tell her that the meeting was in the context of trying to swap a Vorta for the Nagus’s mate—who also happened to be Quark’s mother.

“I’m impressed! What did they do?”

“They . . .” Brunt hesitated. On that occasion most of them had simply been withdrawn, and two had been killed, by Rom and Leck. “They died,” he said at last.

Pel nodded slowly. “So the famous Liquidator does have lobes, eh?”

Brunt looked at her. After the past few months, he had even stopped noticing that she was clothed. “Oh yes.”

“I never imagined I’d say that to a Liquidator.”

“We’re not all monsters. We try to be, but we’re only flesh and blood. Something shows through.”

“You’re actually a pretty decent Ferengi,” she admitted. “Strong, resourceful.” She was standing closer to him now. “Profit-driven.”

“We should keep out of the way of those Breen. I mean . . .”

“You mean you have a reputation to uphold?”

“I do? I mean, I do.” Brunt smiled nastily, suspecting that Pel might actually like that kind of expression. It would fit his reputation as the nasty FCA Liquidator, after all, and she had brought up that reputation. “I don’t like the way they look at me.”

“I don’t like the way they look at me either,” Pel admitted. “In fact, I don’t like the way they look at anyone other than Gaila and Voloczin.” She pulled herself up proudly to her full height, such as it was. “I especially don’t like the way they look at people talking together.”

“Then we shouldn’t let them look at us talking.”

Pel began to giggle, then stopped. “They’d probably assume we’re conspiring together against Gaila, or them.”

“I don’t trust any of you enough to conspire with you, about anything.”
Not yet, anyway,
he thought, and the thought surprised him.

“That won’t stop them,” Pel said. “I was one of the first females to earn profit, and I want to keep earning profit, but … I sometimes wonder if Gaila’s way of doing things is really … well, if it’s really the best way to get the maximum profit.”

“You don’t trust Gaila?”

Pel gave him a disbelieving look, then her expression cleared, and she laughed. “Oh, you were making a joke! Sorry. It’s a long time since I’ve seen irony or subtle humor. The Breen don’t laugh, Bijon only thinks people falling over is funny, and Voloczin . . .”

“Is just a little too different,” Brunt observed.

“You’re right. Of course I don’t trust Gaila; nobody trusts Gaila. Frankly, you’ve been his partner for seven months. That’s not a record, but it’s not that far off.”

“He’s always been a profitable man,” Brunt reminded her. “Everything he does is so beautifully geared toward increasing profit. Not just for himself, but for all of us.”

“I suppose it is, as best he can think of it. But, you know,
sometimes I think he just does it for fun—or for practice. And profit comes second.”

Brunt shivered at the very thought of profit coming second. Yet he had seen Ferengi behave that way before. “Perhaps it runs in the family.”

“The family?”

“His cousin does that a lot.”

Three times, Gaila marched around the racks of supplies in the holoship, stroking a hand along the edges. He gave the same speech to each of the three prime ministers; it was well-rehearsed and carefully honed to sound off-the-cuff, heartfelt, and believable. “We have everything for the growing military defense force.” He paused and lifted a hand phaser from a row of them. “Hand weapons with variable stun and kill settings. Concealable, and ideal for enforcement and protection.” He moved to the next rack. “Sidearms for troops in the field. More powerful, with a longer-lasting power pack, which is easily removable for charging while in the field. Again, very reliable. Accurate up to over a kilometer, variable power, and can fire in pulse or beam mode.”

“What about larger weapons?” each prime minister had asked. “Anti-air, for example,” the Alphan had suggested. The prime minister of Urwyzden Beta wanted “orbital defense.” The man from Gamma had requested “air superiority.”

“I’m glad you asked that,” Gaila said with undisguised delight in each case. He moved his customers into another chamber and activated it. A moving cradle clanked into life, bringing out a mechanism roughly eight feet tall, made of two linked canisters with an array of folded solar receptors and sensor packages. It looked vaguely like a giant, hibernating wasp of some kind. “These are my most … delicious offers,” Gaila went on. “They are drone weapons. Unmanned automatic probes that are fully user-definable. You can program them as passive guardians, to detect and interdict unauthorized approaches, or as offensive weapons that can be sent in waves to overwhelm enemy defensive positions.”

“Armaments?” everyone asked, during their separate visits.

“Kinetic energy missiles are standard, but—for a small fee, of
course—they can be replaced with plasma pulse weapons, photon mortars, or even an antimatter payload with a self-detonation yield of up to two hundred and fifty megatons.” Gaila grimaced. “Though, if you don’t mind my saying so, that option tends to be more for consumers who wish the destruction of planetary ecologies along with their enemies. For the urban pacification you are interested in, I’d recommend the standard or photon mortar options.”

“Fully customizable?”

“Of course. My engineer will make any complex adjustments necessary to fulfill your specifications before delivery, and supply comprehensive manuals.”

Brunt decided it was time to add his voice, to help seal the deal. He could almost feel those bars of latinum brushing against the skin of his fingertips already. “And, as well as automatic systems, they also have—”

“Brunt!” Gaila snapped. “Please! Our customers don’t want to be bored with meaningless technobabble. They want to see their potential purchases in action!”

Why,
Brunt wondered,
did Gaila not want to advertise the remotecontrol options on the drones?
It was unthinkable that he didn’t know about them, as he was always very knowledgeable about his products, and it was equally inconceivable that he didn’t see the option as a selling point. Maybe he wasn’t immune from the stupidity that characterized his cousins after all.

Of course, it wasn’t just the sales pitch that Gaila was enthused about. There were the bribes, the little words of worry, and the outright lies. The words that spread tension and unease. The suggestion to each prime minister that the others had approached the Ferengi in search of offensive weapons, but been turned down.

By the time the prime minister of Urwyzden Gamma had visited the holoship, he was desperate to buy, because he was so certain that Alpha and Beta were plotting against his holdings.

All three planets bought in heavily. And, a month later, they asked Gaila and Brunt to return with more.

By the time of the second visit, there were three Breen guards on the drone production unit. Gaila waved them aside and went through.
Voloczin was curled in the rack, several tentacles twisting their way into access panels on a drone. Lok was at a console, monitoring readings from the drone.

“How are my special babies today?” Gaila asked.

“Happy as Larry, squire,” Voloczin grated. Lok gave a short agreement.

“Good. Business, my friends, is about to be booming.” He laughed. “And booming business is the best kind!”

Orbital traffic around Urwyzden Alpha was light when the war started. Most of the vessels arriving and departing belonged to other governments or private corporations, but there were enough intrasystem transports ascending and descending. A corporate shuttle was the first to explode, speared by a burst of kinetic energy missiles from a drone. Several more Betan shuttles were hit in the moments following. A few vital cargo vessels strayed too close to a drone armed with pulsed phase cannon, and it came to life and peppered the entire flight with fire.