“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!”
Three Months Ago
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.
Passenger vessels weren’t immune, and Urwyzden women and children died in many crashes after being shot down. Pel looked on in horror as another ship exploded on the Golden Handshake’s main viewer. “Unbelievable . . .”
“In what way?” Gaila asked. “We did come here because of a most profitable ongoing military escalation, didn’t we?” He laughed again.
The prime ministers were enraged, screaming at each other over the system’s communications network. “You are murderers!” the Betan yelled at the Alphan. “This is unprecedented and unacceptable! No Urwyzden has ever declared war on another!”
“Declared war!?” the Alphan replied. “We are the victims of your madness. Is this some kind of attempt at a takeover of the Board?”
“We are clear that some members of the Board of Premiers need to be let go!”
“And the sooner the better. Urwyzden Alpha is now in a state of war . . .”
In his palatial quarters aboard ship, Gaila listened to the arguments, accusations, and counteraccusations. They were the finest opera he had ever listened to. This was the kind of situation he had long dreamed of, and knew that his idiot cousin Quark would never have been able to stomach. Thankfully, he had had the sense to have Brunt as his partner; Brunt was a strong man, and would do what it took.
The door chimed, and when he opened it, Lok stepped in, buzzing a report. Gaila raised his glass to the Breen. “Exactly as planned, Thot Lok. Here’s to exploiting the weak for fun and profit.”
Outside in the corridor, Brunt was on his way back to his suite, and overheard Gaila’s comment. It was a strange thing to say, he thought. He continued onward and into his suite, helping himself to a stiff drink. He had profits to count, and it would take time to work out how to invest them all. These profits were stacking up quite nicely.
On their next trip, having arranged for slightly upgraded weapons software and longer-lasting power packs, they approached the Urwyzden system cautiously. Ships were departing on a regular basis, but there was no large-scale exodus yet. Fighting was rather neatly confined to skirmishes in orbit, and things didn’t look that much different on the surface. Nevertheless, the Ferengi took care, because, while they wanted to be welcomed as customers, they didn’t want any of the three governments to take exception to their visiting the others.
“The Beta and Gamma governments may not be pleased to see us visiting Alpha,” Brunt pointed out.
“That’s why we’ve got this.” Pel patted a bulging addition to the flight control panel.
“Ah,” Brunt sighed appreciatively. “A cloaking device?”
“It’s Klingon,” Pel explained. “It came from an old B’rel class. Gaila bought it from an old Duras clan captain who was trying to raise funds to pay his bar bill in exile. The cloak was just about the only part of his bird-of-prey that still worked. And, being on the wrong side of the civil war, he couldn’t really take it back and exchange it for a new ship.”
“Welcome, my friend!” the Alphan prime minister enthused, when Brunt and Gaila visited him. This time they had beamed down to his office, which was a crisp white-and-chrome affair overlooking a deep blue lake. “It seems I was wise to make those purchases.”
“You know it makes sense,” Gaila said.
“And continues to do so. I shall have ongoing business with you, I think. Our own military productivity is still in its initial stages . . .”
“How goes the war?” Brunt asked. “We didn’t see much sign of it.”
“Obviously we are doing our best to ensure that it doesn’t interfere too much with business.” Both Ferengi nodded understandingly. They could appreciate that. “For the most part we’re concentrating on inhibiting the colony worlds’ ability to take hostile action against us. We’re eliminating their satellite weapons, and so forth.” Brunt felt a warm glow around the money belt. That would mean the other worlds’ prime ministers would be ordering replacement drones during this trip. �
��We have also,” the prime minister went on, “begun interning Beta and Gamma citizens in conditioning camps to be sure of their loyalty.”
“I like that,” Gaila said. “I like when a people take their responsibilities seriously.” That pleased the prime minister. Brunt was less enthusiastic. Once they had returned to the ship with a new order and contract, he said so to Gaila. “They’re running the war properly, and taking it to heart,” Gaila told him. “They’ll be the best customers because they’re giving themselves wholly to their responsibilities. They’ll keep us rich for life.”
“The only problem with anything that’s for life, is that it’s only for the living,” Brunt muttered.
“You’re not going all hew-mon on me, are you?” Gaila asked suspiciously.
“Of course not! Who better to rip off than—” Somebody you hate? He had no problem with it. Yet.
Two Months Ago
Gaila looked up as the ranking leader of his Breen mercenaries stomped onto the bridge, while he was alone there. Pel was delivering hardware to Urwyzden Gamma, and Brunt to Beta. Bijon was helping Voloczin to fetch and carry aboard the holoship. “What is it, Lok?” It occurred to him that, were the Breen to switch rank markings between their uniforms, he could find himself addressing the wrong one. That led him to wonder if they occasionally did this to amuse themselves by making a fool out of him. He dismissed the idea; Breen were cold, heartless killers who did what they were told. They didn’t have a sense of humor.
Lok rumbled a warning, describing what he had been observing for some time.
“Brunt and Pel?” Gaila scoffed. “You must be joking.” Lok buzzed a short reply. “Er, yes, I was just thinking that . . .”
Lok leaned forward and slipped a data chip into a padd. Immediately, the screen came to life, and a miniature Brunt and Pel were walking across the bridge of the Golden Handshake a few days earlier. Brunt seemed strangely laid-back as she showed him the innermost secrets of the Klingon cloaking device that Gaila had once gone to such lengths to covertly acquire.
As Gaila watched, he felt a mix of anger and dismay, but at the same time he felt a strange relief. He had always expected to be betrayed by his partners, and at least now he didn’t need to worry about when Brunt or Pel would do so. He couldn’t blame Pel, of course; she was only a female, and the freedoms of wearing clothes and earning profit had clearly gone to her head. It was bound to happen eventually.
Brunt, on the other hand, had been a Liquidator, and had spent a lot of time in the past trying to think like Quark. This was one of the reasons why Gaila was always so reluctant to return home: his relatives were idiots and it was a contagious idiocy. Leaving and buying his own moon had saved his intellect, just as stalking Quark seemed to have whittled Brunt’s intellect down. “Ah well,” Gaila said. “What am I to do with them, eh?”
Lok made a dark, almost subsonic, suggestion.
“You took the words right out of my mouth.” Gaila grimaced. He hated having to do this kind of thing, but sometimes it was unfortunately necessary. He was a weapons dealer, not a soldier, but he recognized the need for the use of weapons, and for the occasional death, and that was why he employed soldiers as well as selling to them. He didn’t like the necessity for killing, but he accepted it as an infrequent price to be paid. A tax, in a manner of speaking. He had even tried to kill Quark once or twice, by sabotage.
Anger began flooding through Gaila. Brunt’s betraying him was one thing. Pel’s betraying him was a little different. But Brunt and Pel colluding in order to betray him … that stung. That wasn’t the sort of personal ambition or mere incompetence that he accepted. “They’re conspiring! Against me!” He blinked. “I can hardly believe it, Lok. How could anyone conspire like that?”
Lok growled something suggestive.
“Brunt? He doesn’t have a heart any more than … any more than a Breen does.” Lok didn’t answer this time. “I suppose,” Gaila sighed, “it’s that time again. Time to lay off workers, and start cutting overheads.”
Lok’s response was tinted with a powerful joy. Gaila wasn’t surprised; those with ice instead of flesh and blood were capable of anything.
Pel’s hands moved quietly over the controls of a small, crab-nosed shuttle. She prided herself on doing a professional job as she guided it into a neat glide path toward Urwyzden Alpha, on what felt like the hundredth cargo run since the Urwyzden conflict had started. She didn’t think about the crates of disruptor rifles secured safely in the hold. She just wondered about Brunt, and what had driven him to join their merry little band. She also wondered if he was really as misanthropic as he appeared—not through any sense of friendship, but simply because she had difficulty believing that anybody could be quite as misanthropic as he seemed.
She noticed a sensor blip approaching, and checked it. It was one of the drone satellite-killers that protected the Alphan southern hemisphere from overflight by the probes of other Urwyzden factions. She paid it no more heed. She had a transponder clearing her for transit, and there was no profit in paying anything more attention than it needed.
The shuttle swept toward the drone, growing clear in its sensors. Inside, the drone’s computers registered the shuttle as nonthreatening, and passed the telemetry on to the various recorders and data-saving equipment that were monitoring it.
This data also played in real time across a set of monitors watched over by a Breen soldier on the holoship. Lok stood behind him, awaiting just the right instant. When the shuttle was at the optimum distance and angle of approach, Lok pointed an index finger at its image, and barked the fatal order.
The soldier touched a control.
Pel never saw the shots coming. The drone simply flashed into life, hitting the shuttle with a volley of kinetic energy missiles at point-blank range. The viewscreen shattered and the console died. Air was streaming out somewhere, and Pel was slammed against the bulkhead behind her as the shuttle lurched.
She fought to reach the controls, thumping a fist on the restart pad. The controls glowed back to life, and she struggled to keep the shuttle level. It was going down fast and hard, and she had no illusions about keeping it flying. She wasn’t sure she would want to anyway, if it was venting atmosphere. There was still the problem of the intense heat caused by friction with the atmosphere, but she raised the shields, modulating them to take most of the heat energy.
Pel had no idea where she was heading, other than down, and just had to hope that the Great Material Continuum would provide a soft bedding for the vessel.
The shuttle screamed through the air, and clipped some hillside treetops as it plowed into a series of thick sandbars in a shallow river. A shielded power plant overlooked the river from the hilltops, but Pel didn’t have much of a chance to notice it before the shuttle flipped and seemed to implode around her. Then there was only blackness, and it was a far deeper blackness than that of the mere void.
Lok congratulated his subordinate on his shooting, and moved away to report the result to Gaila. The Breen soldier paused for the briefest moment to acknowledge the compliment from his commander, and then returned the drone to self-control, and purged its memory of the event.
A group of half a dozen or so Urwyzden Homeland troops emerged from the tree line and observed the crash site. “Is it a Beta shuttle?” one of them asked.
“No. It’s alien. Ferengi, by the looks of it.”
“There are some Ferengi who are important to the prime minister and the Board of Directors. If any of them are harmed . . .”
“I hear you. Let’s check it out.” They walked cautiously down toward the smoking shuttle, keeping their tricorder on it. They wanted to be sure it wouldn’t suddenly explode as a result of whatever damage it had taken. When they reached the stricken vessel, one trooper felt around the edges of one of the hull breaches. “KEM hits, sir.”
“Betan?” another asked.
“Can’t tell. Ours or theirs . . .”
“Let’s hope it was theirs.”
The second soldier saw something tubular in the dark, and reached for it. He had to wiggle partway into the hull breach, and stretched out his arm until it hurt. For a while he could just feel his fingertips brush the surface of the object, but with a final agonizing twist, he managed to drag it forward just enough to get his hand around it.
When he drew it out through the hull breach, he found that it was a disruptor rifle. It wasn’t the same as the phaser rifle he and his comrades carried, but identical to the weapons carried by the Betan factions.
“Sir,” he called out. The rest of the troops came to see. “Look at this.”
The officer in charge took the disruptor. “Betan … yet this is one of the people who supply us with phaser rifles.”
Star Trek: Seven Deadly Sins Page 13
