“You’ve never been to Risa before?” he had asked her.
“I’ve heard of it, but never imagined I’d ever go there.”
“I’ve tried to avoid it myself,” Brunt agreed. Before he could say anything else, or even compliment her on her state of undress, a hew-mon bumped into him. “Watch where you’re going,” Brunt snapped.
“Hey,” the hew-mon said, “it’s okay. I just slipped is all. It’s the bloody sand, you know. It twists your feet under you when you try to turn around.” Brunt had noticed this himself.
“Another reason to hate Risa.”
“Nah,” the hew-mon said. “Just the beachfront properties, you know?” He shook his head, with its short copper fur glinting in the sunlight. “Me, I like the mountains better. Though they’re not as good as the ones on . . .” He frowned in thought. “That banking planet. You must know the one; you’re a Ferengi.”
Brunt looked sidelong at the hew-mon, Pel all but forgotten. “Banking planet?”
“There’s a three-planet system, mainly does corporate banking and investments, bonds, that kind of thing … But their mountains are fantastic. Best in the galaxy for climbing.”
“What sort of people are they?” Brunt asked, suddenly interested.
“Pacifists, same as here. No wars, no military. Just lots of banks and lots of mountains.”
Brunt grinned in what he hoped seemed like a friendly manner. “Tell me more . . .”
“A three-planet system?” Gaila echoed, later that night. Brunt had called to arrange to meet at a dabo club. It was noisy and smelly and a lot more fun than the beach. Gaila smiled, and nodded to himself. “It’s a sign.”
“A sign?” Brunt didn’t believe in supernatural aid.
“Three always was my lucky number.”
“They’re called the Urwyzden.” Brunt frowned, stroking the bar of gold-pressed latinum he wore around his neck. “I’ve never heard of that place described as a vacation paradise until today.”
“But you have heard of it?”
“I’ve seen FCA records, and communicated with some of the governmental officials on Urwyzden Alpha.”
“When you were a Liquidator for the FCA?”
“Exactly. I’ve had cause to deal with Ferengi who have invested their profits with the Urwyzden.”
“Invested?”
“It’s a banking center,” Brunt said. “Mainly for governments and interplanetary conglomerates. A lot of small single-planet or single-system governments deposit escrow with the Urwyzden, and use the place to broker deals and holdings. And sometimes, the most … lobeless of Ferengi do so as well.”
“Offworld banking?” Gaila said, disbelievingly. “There are Ferengi who trust aliens to hold their assets? Inconceivable!”
“Oh, but it happens,” Brunt went on, warming to his subject, and, as always when that happened, sounding personally affronted. “There are Ferengi out there who like nothing better than to rob the Nagal treasury of its cut of the banking charges.” Brunt’s hands subconsciously curled into claws, as if to wring the payments out of someone. “When a Ferengi collections agency charges a debtor”—he spat the word—“ten slips for the communication telling him that they’re charging him, one of those slips goes to the Nagus.”
“As is his right.”
“But when an alien bank does the same thing, there is no profit for the Ferengi. That’s precisely why Grand Nagus Lifax made it a crime for Ferengi to bank offworld.”
“Lifax? Ha! He was the biggest idiot the Nagal throne has ever had. A man who thought that harassing people and stopping them earning profit would make them better able to invest that profit with him.”
Brunt fixed Gaila with a warning look. “Biggest idiot until now,” he corrected him. “But it doesn’t matter. The law is the law, and we should be proud to uphold it.”
“Of course,” Gaila said. “That’s why I allow Pel to wear clothes and earn profit. The laws passed by our idiot-in-chief are, as you say, the law.” He broke off as a cheer of “Dabo!” erupted at the next table. The interruption seemed to have derailed Gaila’s train of thought. He frowned and said, “So, Urwyzden … Why are pacifists of interest to us?”
Brunt thought for a moment. Truth to tell, it was the opportunity to search their files for the identities of Ferengi who banked there illegally that he had first thought of. “Because they have something that others may want to steal, and no way to defend themselves from them.”
Gaila nodded slowly. “Interesting … The riskier the road, the greater the profit.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Brunt said, insincerely.
“Let’s hit the road, then.”
Six Months Ago
Urwyzden Alpha was a turquoise ornament set into the velvet heavens. Deep oceans formed a band around the equator, separating continents that reached up to the clouds with beautiful razor-edged mountains. Where the mountain slopes fell away toward the more extreme latitudes, the rich green of the forests blended into the crisp white of the polar caps.
As the Golden Handshake entered orbit, a white Federation ship was peeling away from the planet. Brunt couldn’t see all of the ship’s name or registry on the view shown on the main screen, but it ended with an E. “Sovereign class,” Pel said. “Wish I could take one of those for a spin. More transporter rooms, faster engines; think of the profit we could make with one of those. . . .”
Gaila looked out at the vast, sleek form as it rode proudly forward. It didn’t need to be streamlined like a creature built for racing in order to travel in a vacuum, but it was beautiful. “I wonder . . .”
“What?” Brunt asked.
“How much it would cost to commission the hew-mons to build me one of those as a private yacht,” Gaila said dreamily.
“Can’t cost more than that moon used to cost you to run.” Gaila looked at him piercingly, and Brunt smirked. “Did you imagine the FCA didn’t know exactly what its income and overheads were?” He could tell from Gaila’s conflicted expressions that he had thought exactly that. Which in turn meant he had set out to make that the case, which meant the FCA’s figures weren’t necessarily correct. Brunt made a mental note to find out how much Gaila’s moon really had cost to run. One never knew when some tidbit of fiscal information could open a door or two.
Someday, Brunt promised himself, his old office door would be opened to him again.
Gaila continued giving instructions. “Lok, scan for locations of military bases and defensive weapons emplacements.”
Lok snapped an affirmative and began working the sensor controls. “According to the latest open-source Federation database,” Pel advised, “Urwyzden has no armed forces.”
“No armed forces?” Gaila echoed. “Do you mean no military at all? Do you mean that hew-mon Brunt spoke to was actually correct?”
“That’s what the Federation have listed.”
“If I was the Urwyzden,” Brunt said darkly, “I’d hide my military from the Federation. And anyone else.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe such an important and fiscally sensitive planet would have no protection at all.”
Lok straightened up from the sensor console and made a surprised-sounding comment. Gaila looked at him. “It sounds unbelievable, but Lok says there are no military installations detectable.”
“That just means we need new sensors,” Brunt scoffed. Or new bodyguards, he thought. He didn’t dare say that aloud, since, even though he didn’t understand anything Lok said, Lok clearly understood everyone else in the room.
The biggest cultural museum on Urwyzden Alpha was a banking museum. The second through seventh biggest museums were also museums of banking. The eighth biggest was a general cultural museum, which, unlike the banking museums, seemed aimed at an offworld audience rather than a native one. Brunt and Gaila had taken Brunt’s shuttle down to the central spaceport and parked as closely as they could to the sprawling pyramid of its terminal.
Much as both Ferengi would rather have visited
the banking museums to compare Urwyzden development with that of Ferengi culture, they took a tour of the general history and culture exhibits.
The Urwyzden were small humanoids, perhaps the size of a prepubescent or teenaged Ferengi, and had slate-gray skin, gouged with wrinkles and studded with thick patches. There were, however, plenty of visitors to the planet, and so the Ferengi didn’t stand out that much from the hew-mons, Tellarites, and others who were visiting. The hew-mon Brunt had met on Risa had been right about the mountains, and it was clear that as many people came for them as came to do financial business.
The museum was a sprawling complex detailing Urwyzden evolution, and it was singularly lacking in displays of weapons and famous battles, either in the halls of preserved artifacts or the holosuite reconstructions of important events. Even the tour guide, who was so diminutive that she would have made Pel look as massive as Bijon, explained when asked that “Urwyzden has never had a war, in its entire history.”
“But, don’t conflicts lead to new inventions?” a hew-mon tourist asked.
“Perhaps among other races,” the guide said. “It’s true that Urwyzden civilization was ancient before it progressed enough to discover space travel. This is in comparison to other species’ development, but we could point out that several civilizations had risen and fallen on, say, Earth, before space travel was discovered there. Only one civilization rose here, and it never fell. But, when the time was right, we did develop the technology, and colonized the other Class-M planets in the system.” The guide smiled, showing tiny teeth. “It is true, as you said, that necessity is the mother of invention, but there are other necessities. When we needed space travel, it was invented. But we never needed to kill ourselves to do so.”
On their way back to the spaceport, Brunt and Gaila passed every kind of expensive luxury transport. It was said that some bankers had private homes on floating mountains tipped upside down and supported over the oceans by massive gravity lifters. A quick call to the Golden Handshake, and the download of some imagery from orbit showed that this was true.
“This is the richest system I’ve ever seen,” Gaila said hungrily. “They could afford to pay top prices for any weapons systems imaginable.”
“If only they had a need for them,” Brunt pointed out.
“I can’t believe for a moment that any civilization, let alone one that is so steeped in finance and brokering, could have no use for weaponry. There must be some people out there who want to deprive them of all those funds in all those currencies.”
“People other than us, you mean?”
“Exactly. And I don’t mean businessmen either. There must be robbers and pirates who know about this place. If even hew-mons on Risa know about it, the Orions must.”
“They have never had a war,” Brunt said, thinking aloud, “but war and protection are different things. Urwyzden must have a use for defensive and security weapons systems to protect their financial complex from ordinary criminals, surely?”
“Let’s find out,” Gaila suggested. “I’ve arranged a nice, quiet meeting with very discreet representatives of the Urwyzden Confederacy’s government.”
The Urwyzden government people were a trio of almost identical middle-aged officials in the latest funereal fashions, with black suits and high collars.
They were meeting with the Ferengi in a very old gaming club built into the side of a mountain. The carpets had borne the footfalls of centuries, and ancient clocks ticked and occasionally sang creakily in the darkest corners of the room. “What you have heard is true,” the Minister of the Interior was saying. “We have never had need of weapons. We maintain an attitude of strict neutrality, even with the Romulans, the former Dominion . . .”
Brunt looked sidelong at them. It was almost inconceivable that a place so steeped in money and profit could be forever unmolested. War was rare in the Ferengi Alliance, but it had been known, and surely there were criminal elements who would find the Urwyzden’s vaults and information far too valuable to be unattractive.
“But what about Orion pirates? The Korth? These worlds of yours are such ripe targets for robbers and raiders . . .”
The minister’s gnarled features twisted and flowed into what passed for an Urwyzden smile. “Without naming names, gentlemen, I suspect that you will find that many of the backers and investors in such … entrepreneurial endeavors trust the Urwyzden fiscal system to ensure that their own assets remain liquid without any outside interference.”
“You mean the Orion Syndicate—”
“The what? I’m sorry, I must have misheard; for a moment I thought you were about to suggest that a purely fictional organization of doubtful integrity really existed.”
“Orions in general then . . .”
“It’s certainly the case that a number of Orion conglomerates place funds in escrow with us. I believe they prefer the convenience of not having to wait for Federation bureaucrats to go through the motions as they would, say, with the Bank of Bolius. We can facilitate that.”
“And what about those races with a lust for conquest instead of profit?” Brunt asked.
“A race that was truly geared for conquest—say, the way the Cardassians were a few decades ago—would be so geared for war that, yes, they would conquer us easily. But the other races, who would then be left in difficult circumstances, would, I’m sure, find it in their interest to make things right.” The minister’s smile widened. Brunt felt the opportunity slip from his grasp, and he could see the same reaction reflected in Gaila’s expression. Then the minister blinked slowly. “Nevertheless, you do bring up an interesting point, and it has been considered in the recent past—what with the Dominion War and the Borg invasion—that some orbital defense platforms would be a wise investment. These would allow … others time to recognize the importance of their decision . . .”
“Oddly enough,” Gaila said quickly, “orbital defense drones are Gailtek’s specialty.”
“Oddly enough, I thought they might be.”
Within the hour, Gaila had sealed a deal to supply the three Urwyzden planets with orbital drone networks. He was good, Brunt thought with grudging admiration. He hadn’t even noticed when Gaila passed the minister the bribe.
Once back aboard the Golden Handshake, Gaila had Pel take the ship off to the vicinity of his old moon, claiming that he could pick up the orbital drones there, among other things. At first, the crew were delighted with the news of a decent sale, but Brunt could only see the downside: “It’s a good sale, but a one-off,” he said. “We need a regular source of capital that offers good dividends. Profit is for life, not just for a holiday.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Gaila agreed. “That’s one of the reasons I brought you onto our team. You think like a profit machine. You’re smart.”
“Perhaps if we introduced deliberate flaws into the drone software, forcing the Urwyzden to continually purchase updates—”
“An excellent idea, but somewhat limited to a minor product line.” Gaila paced around the bridge. “But you inspire me, Brunt! You inspire me … Now … There are three planets: Urwyzden Alpha, Beta, and Gamma.”
“Three planets, three opportunities.”
“Yes … But not for defense against outside attackers.” Brunt wondered where this was leading, and felt that Gaila’s speech was sounding a little more rehearsed than it should for a sudden, budding idea. “What if the Urwyzden planets fought among themselves,” Gaila began, “for political control of the fiscal services? There’d be potential for massive profit then, all of which would need to be banked somewhere … else.”
“Then there might be a demand for regular weapons shipments—”
“Might?! It would be a profit farm! An ongoing struggle, kept at just the right level, would make for a perfect regular income.”
“Regular.” Brunt shivered with anticipation at the thought.
“And if we could then control the level of product use—limit the amount of charge a weapon
could hold, even the means by which it is used—we could have a going monopoly. Our own private war.”
“How much more profitable could we get? It would be a big, ongoing job, with plenty of up-front investment needed.”
“I know just the people,” Gaila said, and Brunt wondered how long it would be before he finally got used to hearing Gaila say that.
Brunt was less annoyed to be back at Risa than he had been to visit it before. Partly it was the thought of Pel properly undressed, and partly it was because this time he and Gaila were visiting a Tongo parlor inland.
They had both played well, ending up as the last two players in the game they had joined, and walked away with three times as much latinum as they had originally bought in with. “My lucky number,” Gaila had reminded Brunt, when the subject was raised.
Star Trek: Seven Deadly Sins Page 11
