Star Trek: ALL - Seven Deadly Sins (17 page)

“No need,” the prime minister interrupted. “We have already shot down the vessel to which you refer.”

In his suite, Brunt listened in to the communications channel. Eavesdropping was a vital skill in the FCA, if one was to uncover evidence of fraud, illicit unionizing, and so on. It was always a good way to retrieve salable information.

So,
he thought,
Gaila is beginning to betray his crew.
He wondered how long it would be before it was his turn. It was time to take action, he decided. Time to look after number one. Time to visit Bijon.

“Bijon,” Brunt began, oozing false camaraderie. “You look tired. Haven’t you had a lunch break today?”

“I’m all right,” Bijon protested bashfully. “I’ll just get this manifest loaded, then I’m done for a while. I can have lunch then.”

“If you say so.” Brunt hesitated, as if just thinking of something.
“Oh, do you know … they do serve the most exquisite tube-grub casserole in the dining room. It’s the best I’ve ever tasted outside of Ferenginar itself.”

“Oh, that sounds good,” Bijon replied. “I like tube grubs.”

“Everybody likes tube grubs,” Brunt told him. “You wouldn’t be a Ferengi if you didn’t like tube grubs.”

“My father doesn’t like them.”

Brunt bit his tongue before it could run on ahead and say something along the lines of his not having expected a Pakled to like tube grubs. “Well, almost everyone,” he said at last.

“That’s true enough,” Bijon agreed. “Are you coming as well?”

“Not at the moment. I already ate, less than an hour ago.”

“Aw. Oh well.”

“Oh, and Bijon?” Brunt put on an expression of having just thought of something. “Why don’t you check with Voloczin that the remote control for the Alphan drone weapons is working correctly. I’m sure I noticed some degradation in their performance over the past few days.”

“Oh, right.” Bijon nodded slowly. “I’ll ask.”

Voloczin was draped over the entire surface of a table at one end of the dining hall when Bijon entered. Lok and a couple of his soldiers were seated at another table, consuming something from canisters through flexible tubes that fitted directly into their faceplates. Bijon went to the replicators and ordered the tube-grub casserole. It was very nice, just as Brunt had said it would be.

“Oh, Volo,” Bijon said, “are the—what are they called, the remote control for the drone things. Are they working all right?”

“The what?” Voloczin demanded, startled.

“The remote-controlled drone things.”

“Oh, er, those … Ah, well, you see, matey, me old mucker . . .” Lok stepped up behind the octopoid engineer and barked a command. “Righty-dokey, skip!” Voloczin suddenly scooted forward, two incredibly strong tentacles reaching out and whipping around Bijon. One grabbed him in a rib-crushing grip, while the other tied itself around the large Ferengi’s neck. Bijon tried to squeal in shock, but the tentacle around his throat had already crushed his windpipe. Turning a deeper shade of purplish orange, Bijon grabbed at the tentacle and exerted all
of his not inconsiderable strength to try to tear it away, but the tentacle was like a welded steel cable, and simply would not move.

In a matter of seconds, Bijon’s arms fell limply, and Voloczin let him go.

While Bijon was talking with Voloczin, and Gaila was on the bridge, Brunt used a site-to-site transport to beam into Gaila’s suite of rooms. That was another skill that had often proved its worth during Brunt’s long career with the FCA, and at least this time he didn’t materialize in a wardrobe.

He established a link between his padd and Gaila’s computer. The cracking tools in the padd made short work of Gaila’s security, and Brunt began to browse. He gave the computer the word
Urwyzden
to play with, and sorted the files by date. They went back years, giving the lie to the idea that Gaila hadn’t heard of the place until Brunt himself had spoken of it.

Stranger still was a communication with a hew-mon just before they arrived at Risa. Gaila had primed that hew-mon to approach Brunt! From there, Brunt went into Gaila’s private communications links, but found nothing openly or clearly suspicious to him. He then did the same with the Urwyzden Alpha computer net, and explored it thoroughly. He didn’t find anything there to indicate what might be going on either, but he did see tracks of mass deletions. Gaila had been deleting records as he went, meaning there was something he needed kept secret.

It occurred to Brunt to compare the files he had just copied from Gaila’s computer with the Urwyzden Alpha network and look for matches in files. There were dozens.

Gaila had invested heavily in Urwyzden hiking and mountaineering resorts—well, Brunt thought, that explained the hew-mon’s mentioning them—over the past several years.

There was a sound at the door of the entry hall, and Brunt hurriedly disconnected his padd from the computer, and initiated another site-to-site transport. This time he materialized in the hangar bay.

Gaila, Voloczin, and Lok moved swiftly into Gaila’s quarters. “Bijon would never have asked such a thing on his own,” Gaila was saying.

“He was a few Borg short of a collective,” Voloczin agreed.

“Which means Brunt is betraying me! Damn the FCA! He probably still works for them after all.” How could he have been so stupid? He should have listened to Quark all along; his cousin was an old enemy of Brunt, and knew him a lot better than Gaila. Brunt would take all the profit now, and probably waste it on the legal cut for the Nagus. Greed was good, but Brunt had the wrong type of greed. “Where is he now?”

Brunt climbed into his shuttle, and flew it out of the
Golden Handshake
’s hangar. Setting course for the Urwyzden Alpha capital, he felt much more comfortable alone in the shuttle. It was just the right size for him, and it struck him that it just wasn’t big enough for both him and Gaila.

Just as the
Golden Handshake
wasn’t.

He had made sure to program the shuttle’s transponder with Gaila’s personal signal, and so faced no challenge as he descended toward the city that clung to the Alpha’s largest mountain like serrations on a blade. He called ahead and asked to speak to the war minister, who answered promptly.

“This is Brunt, GAT. Gaila has asked me to check over the wreckage of the shuttle that crashed in your territory recently. He wishes to be sure of the pilot’s condition.”

“Brunt,”
the war minister replied.
“The shuttle you refer to has been taken into custody. The pilot survived, but we have her interred at Conditioning Camp Seven. Does Gaila want her executed for her betrayal of him?”

“Of course he does! How could he not? That’s why I’m coming to collect the worthless cretin, so he can have the pleasure himself. Can you have her ready for me?”

“Of course. We’re sending coordinates and clearance. Just follow the instructions.”

Conditioning Camp Seven was far to the north, bordering the arctic snow fields. It was situated in a network of deep crevasses, whose sheer cliff faces were slick with black ice. The inmates were housed in caves with force-field projectors at the openings instead of doors. Since the fields let air molecules through freely, they also let the cold through.

Stacks of twisted little bodies were piled at one end of the northernmost crevasse, and there was no sign of any real activity for the inmates. Brunt couldn’t understand the purpose of such a place. Intellectually he knew it was a place to dump the unwanted and be rid of them, but he couldn’t comprehend why there was no manufacturing industry at least. The inmates simply froze to death or rotted away. Even the Cardassians, when they had set up such camps on Bajor and other worlds, had seen the profit in putting their unfortunates to good use.

The Urwyzden, for all that they were an economic force to be reckoned with, clearly knew nothing about generating profit.

He was reluctant to leave his shuttle, which he had landed on a pad kept clear of snow and ice. He’d rather let the Urwyzden bring Pel to him than have to set foot among the walking dead. They gave him the creeps, and, worse, their condition made him feel as angry as Quark’s allowing his employees to unionize had. Was this what the Federation types called a conscience pricking at him? He hoped not.

Two Alphan soldiers dragged a figure toward him. At first he thought it was another Urwyzden, but he realized with a wave of revulsion that it was Pel, shrunken to the point where she looked smaller than her usual eager self. Her tailor-made pilot’s jumpsuit hung from her in shreds. She was shivering, which wasn’t surprising, considering the cold, but somehow Brunt felt that it was caused by a deeper chill.

The soldiers shoved her toward him, and she fell at his feet. “There you go,” one of the soldiers said. “She’s sold weapons to the Betans.”

“So I heard. That’s stealing profit from me and Gaila.” Brunt knew he sounded harsh, and the soldiers laughed.

“And means the Betans can kill our folks. Make it slow and painful for her. Maybe cut off her ears, eh?”

Brunt’s lips pulled back, showing sharp teeth. “I can promise you, I’ll be getting dividends out of my anger. Every last slip.” He looked around, and spotted a few other inmates standing nearby, shaking and trying not to be noticed. “I’ll tell you what, lads . . .” He took the bar of latinum from around his neck. “Gaila and I like to see a full program of executions. What would you say if I offered you this bar of latinum to take, say, these half-dozen along as well. The Breen could do with
some target practice, and a holographic shooting range is never, you know, quite the same thing.” He grinned evilly.

The soldiers grinned back, and began shoving other prisoners toward him. In a few minutes, his shuttle was filled with shivering, stinking prisoners. “Thank you,” Pel managed to say.

“Don’t thank me,” Brunt grumbled. “I’m just doing what an FCA Liquidator should do to a Ferengi who banks offworld and robs the Nagal treasury of its lawful share.”

Brunt had had more sense than to return to the
Golden Handshake,
or even to Urwyzden Alpha itself. Vouched for by some of the prisoners whom he had flown out of Conditioning Camp Seven, he had been allowed to land safely in a settlement on Ur-wyzden Beta.

The town clustered under an overhang at a bend in a river, and the marshes all around reminded Brunt and Pel of Ferenginar, though it didn’t rain nearly as much. It was also better protected from Alphan drones, and Brunt felt safer there.

Agents from all three colonies were waiting for him when he took a simple room in one of the town’s largest hotels. None of them were looking to buy weapons, and he had half expected them all to want to kill him, but they weren’t that stupid. They all had the same question: “What did you sell to the other factions, and what do we need to counteract those purchases?”

“Let’s talk prices,” Brunt had said.

“No,” the Betan had said.

“Ten bars of latinum,” the representative from Gamma had offered.

“Name your price,” the Alphan said bluntly. “And it’s yours.”

Brunt thought long and hard. The Alphans had been building the death camps. Selling to them would be selling only mass death,
which, in the long run, would be counterproductive. The dead couldn’t pay.

“The dead can’t pay,” he said aloud.

“What?” Pel asked.

“The dead can’t pay. There’s no profit in them.” He sighed. “Call the three contacts we’ve seen. Tell them I’m going to give them what they want. And, Pel?”

“Yes?”

“Have all three appointments made for here, tomorrow at noon.”

The next day, three rather uncomfortable Urwyzden sat beside the pool on Brunt’s private patio. “Ten bars,” he said to the one from Gamma, and got it. He got the Alphan’s thumbprint on his padd, for a fee of two hundred bars of gold-pressed latinum. Then he grinned at them all. “And now comes the part where you all wish you had made a deal for exclusivity.”

“Gailtek sold you all the same resources for the same price. All of you. And to be sure that Gaila kept earning, he started this war.” He paused to let that sink in. “There are Breen troops with Gaila, who control all your satellite drones by remote. They fired the shots that began this war, and they continue to manipulate it.”

“This is valuable information,” the Betan agent said slowly. “Worth more than you’ve been paid. Very generous of you.”

“This is not generosity—it’s a price, and we Ferengi believe that prices are … sacred. Profit doesn’t always come in latinum—and neither do fees that must be paid.”

When the Urwyzden had gone, Pel looked thoughtfully at Brunt. “You’re really not what I’d expected. I was thinking … Gailtek is surely doomed.”

“Not necessarily, but we are not going to be part of it anymore, are we?”

“The thought occurs that you need a new partner.”

“So do you, if you want to keep”—Brunt still could only say it through gritted teeth—“being a profit-earning female.”

“So … if we’re partners, what do we do next?”

Brunt knew the answer to that with every fiber of his being. It was instinct.
“As our business rival, we want to ruin Gaila and outdo his profits. As a loyal retired Liquidator of the FCA, and partner, we want Gaila brought to justice. As the people he tried to kill, we want him … dealt with.” Brunt kept the final answer as a thought to himself. As Gaila was a member of Quark’s family, Brunt wanted him humiliated as well as dead.

Shuttles converged in the darkness between worlds, hurtling toward a minor moon caught in the gravitational eddies between Ur-wyzden Beta and Gamma.

They didn’t arrive undetected. Voloczin, checking over the systems of the holoship, which was parked in a deep crater, noticed the blips on the sensor screens. “You what?” he said to himself, flushing an orange tinge. The sensor returns were coming from both of the colony planets, but they weren’t forming up to engage each other. Voloczin couldn’t understand that; the two groups were enemies, weren’t they?

The first strafing run convinced him otherwise. A considerable chunk of the drone perimeter set up around the moon was destroyed in a second. “We’re under attack!” Voloczin shouted, summoning Breen soldiers to the controls.