by David Mack
“In order to bring our customers here,” Gaila said. “Why not? We have enough firepower to pulverize a fleet. And if they try to take us hostage by destroying our supply drones, we can tweak the plant’s settings to produce new ones, and then we’re back in business.” He stepped up to Zinos and took him by the arms, as if he were about to shake some sense into him. “This isn’t just our factory anymore, Zinos. It’s our damned showroom—the best in the galaxy!”
“You really think it’s better to wait for buyers to come here than to take our product to where we already know the buyers are?”
Gaila grinned. “Patience, Zinos. Remember the Fourteenth Rule of Acquisition: ‘Sometimes the quickest way to find profits is to let them find you.’ ”
The Net Gain was a ghost in the cosmic night. It wasn’t quite invisible running in stealth mode, but unless someone searching for it knew exactly what to look for, they weren’t likely to notice it. Custom-designed warp coil insulators reduced its energy signature almost to nil. As long as Brunt maintained radio silence—a requirement that was easier for him than for most, simply because he had no one to talk to—he and his ship could cruise unnoticed through the void.
On his sensor screen was the Orion argosy Silago-Ekon. He knew the ship well. Its crew was composed of wanted criminals from throughout known space, and in the past he had brought nearly half a dozen of them to face justice—always for a price, of course. He’d crossed the Silago-Ekon’s path so many times over the years that he had its energy signature stored in the Net Gain’s permanent sensor logs, and an alert dameon monitoring law-enforcement channels for any mention of the argosy’s movements or actions.
As usual, the crew of the Silago-Ekon thought they were safe from detection because they were cloaked. It was almost enough to make Brunt laugh. He’d snuck aboard the ship on three separate occasions in the past seven years. On his last clandestine visit he had made a point of recording the technical specifications of their cloaking device. Now he tracked them using the same harmonic subfrequency the Silago-Ekon’s crew employed to operate their ship’s sensors and comms through its invisibility screen. And because he had their sensor specs, he knew how to keep them from detecting his ship, even at close range.
To them, I’m just a shadow.
Brunt suspected that tracking the Orion ship would likely prove to be a roundabout path to his true quarry, but with the Nausicaans’ ship blown to bits, the Silago-Ekon was now the only lead he had left. If they have whatever it is the Nausicaans went to that Husnock wreck to find, he reasoned, then they’re probably trying to get their hands on the same prize. And if I know Gaila, he’s already working an angle that will turn their discovery into his profits.
It wasn’t the most farfetched plan Brunt had ever embraced. But it still contained far too many variables for his liking. What if the Orion ship headed for home, looking to sell its information rather than involve itself in the struggle to capture actual Husnock hardware? Worse, he thought, what if I’ve misread the situation, and the Syndicate left the planet empty-handed?
Most significantly, Brunt was not pleased with the potential costs of getting caught in a crossfire involving Husnock doomsday weapons. The greater the risk, the higher the potential return on investment needed to be in order to justify the expense and danger of continuing the hunt. No matter how I crunch the numbers, capturing Gaila and bringing him back to prison just isn’t worth it if I end up dead in the process. Pride is nice, but it’s no substitute for profit.
He had seen a lot of jobs go bad. His lobes told him this would be one of them.
Times like this almost made Brunt consider taking on a partner. A good one could watch his back and double his field of fire. Unfortunately, a partner would insist on sharing the profit.
There’s always a catch, Brunt simmered.
A blip shifted on the secondary tactical screen. It was the pair of Starfleet vessels Brunt had left behind at the wreck. They seemed to be engaged in a search pattern, no doubt in an effort to locate the fleeing Silago-Ekon before it escaped their sensor range completely.
I could help them, Brunt mused, but what would be in it for me? He took a moment to check his account balance at the Bank of Bolarus. As he had expected, his invoice to Starfleet had not yet been remunerated. They never pay their bills, he fumed. Of late he had come to hold the opinion that the secret to the Federation’s explosive growth was that it was a civilization of freeloaders who could always be counted on to default on their debts.
Secretly, he envied them. I’d do the same thing if I could—but I’d have to face an auditor from the FCA. Unlike Starfleet, I’m held accountable for my business practices. He shook his head. They don’t know how good they’ve got it.
The Starfleet vessels veered farther from the Silago-Ekon while Brunt watched. In a matter of minutes, they would forfeit all chance of catching up to the argosy.
He felt no pity for the Starfleeters. They had gotten in his way inside the Husnock wreck. Had it not been for their interference, he could have neutralized the Nausicaans and rescued their hostages for a huge reward. At least, he assumed there had been a reward. If the four scientists’ lives had been worth sending three Starfleet vessels into deep space to recover, then their safe return must be worth a small fortune in gold-pressed latinum.
And, of course, he would have had the data chip—and that would have brought him one step closer to capturing Gaila. But then came Starfleet. And I kissed my profits goodbye.
Now the ship was gone, blasted to smithereens. So much for salvage rights, he lamented. The scientists were on the Titan, and the Nausicaans had probably been vaporized with their ship, which meant there would be no bounties to collect on them.
He owed Starfleet no favors. Of that he was certain.
But the situation ahead of him seemed to be escalating faster than he had expected. The same rumors that had drawn Gaila and the Nausicaans to these remote sectors had also brought the Orion Syndicate. If pressed to lay odds on there being other dangerous factions lurking out here with an eye to capturing Husnock weapons and starships, Brunt would definitely bet yes.
The more players there are, the harder they’ll fight. There was a fearsome arsenal at stake, the kind that would translate into tremendous military power. To Brunt that meant he should expect more violence and greater bloodshed. That would do him more harm than good.
In a situation like this, having Starfleet around might be useful. After all, as annoying as they were, Starfleeters were at least semifriendly and not hostile by reflex. Plus, thanks to their rules and regulations, their Prime Directive and laughably quaint morals and ethics, their behavior and reactions were highly predictable. In a volatile equation such as the one taking shape ahead of Brunt, the presence of Starfleet might actually be helpful.
Unless they cheat me out of my bounty, he realized. What if they arrest Gaila before I have a chance to catch him? That, Brunt knew, would be a major financial setback, not to mention a stain on his professional reputation. He also had dealt with Starfleet enough times to know that those consequences weren’t even the worst-case scenario. What if those do-gooder morons wind up arresting me on some puffed-up charge? I’d be laughed out of the Entrepreneurs Club, or at the very least have my Magnus-level membership downgraded. It was a nightmare outcome . . . until he remembered that humiliated was still better than dead.
No risk, no reward.
Brunt powered up his subspace burst transmitter. He programmed it to send an encrypted signal on a Starfleet frequency, one the Silago-Ekon would be unlikely to detect. After making sure his signal would be stripped of its origin metadata and bounced multiple times among several subspace radio relays—all necessary precautions to conceal its source; Brunt couldn’t have anyone calling him a Starfleet stooge—he sent the Titan a message containing the Silago-Ekon’s heading, speed, and cloaking device specifications.
He shut down his transmitter and reclined his pilot’s chair, curious as to what woul
d happen next. Let’s see if Starfleeters know a gift when they see one.
Fourteen
* * *
Precious minutes were slipping away. Vale felt a growing unease at the prospect of losing her last lead to the stolen Husnock military codes—a misstep that might soon manifest itself in the form of a devastating attack on an unprepared civilian target. That was the nightmare scenario, the one that kept her awake at night. All around her on the bridge of the Titan, her senior officers were doing all they could to hunt down the Orion argosy, marshaling all of the ship’s formidable sensors and tactical resources—but the longer the search dragged on, the less likely it seemed that they would recover the Orions’ fast-cooling trail.
If we don’t catch a break pretty soon, this—
Fast beeps of alert feedback from the tactical console. Tuvok silenced the alarm and reacted with beetled brows to whatever new information was scrolling across his panel. “Captain, we’ve received an encrypted burst of data.” The Vulcan keyed more commands into his console. “Unable to confirm the origin of the signal, but the data is . . . intriguing.”
Vale stood to face him. “Don’t keep us in suspense, Commander.”
“It is an anonymous tip to the heading, speed, and approximate position of the Orion argosy.” More tapped commands. “Also included are files that identify the vessel as the Silago-Ekon, an Orion argosy registered in the Ferengi Alliance, and specifications for the modified settings of its Klingon-made cloaking device.”
It seemed too good to be true, and that bothered Vale. She looked to Sarai for input. “Number One? What do you think?”
“It could be a disinformation tactic.” Sarai used the command terminal beside her chair to review the data Tuvok had received. “Since we can’t trace the source, it’s possible the Orions set up automated transmitters to cover their escape, by pointing us in the wrong direction and tempting us into adjusting our sensors to their least-helpful configuration.”
That sounded implausible to Vale—but she wasn’t sure she trusted Sarai’s instincts. Am I doubting her because her analysis sounds off, or because I desperately want to trust this tip?
Not ready to give up hope, Vale faced ops. “Rager. Run another scan for any sign of the distortions Doctor Pek told us to look for.” Playing a hunch, she added, “And target it along the heading that we just received.” A sly look at Sarai. “ ‘Trust, but verify,’ as the saying goes.”
Her crew reacted like the well-integrated team they had become: Tuvok relayed the heading data from tactical to ops without anyone needing to ask, and Rager plugged the new coordinates into a focused sensor sweep. It took only a few moments for her to get the results. Rager shook her head. “Sensor contact negative, sir.”
“Then we’ll have to put our secret source’s cloaking intel to work.”
That was all Vale had to say to prompt Sarai into action. The first officer moved to stand behind Lieutenant Torvig at the engineering console. “How close are we to bringing Doctor Ra-Havreii’s sensor modifications online?”
“They are almost done,” the Choblik said. His bionic hands fine-tuned the settings on his panel. “The main array is online now, and the secondary and supplemental arrays will be back online in two minutes.”
“The main array is all we need for this,” Sarai said. “Engage the new mods, then plug in the details about the Silago-Ekon’s cloaking system.”
Torvig regarded Sarai with mild anxiety even as he carried out her orders. “Commander, at this extreme range, scanning within such narrow frequency parameters will make it difficult to penetrate a cloaking device of this kind, unless we manage to aim our sensors directly at it.”
“Let Mister Tuvok worry about that, Lieutenant.”
“Understood, Commander.” Torvig finished engaging the modified sensors. “Ready.”
Sarai nodded at Tuvok, who started his tactical scan. It took only seconds for his console to chirp with a confirmation of contact. “Captain,” he said, “we have detected what appears to be a cloaked starship at the indicated position and heading. Its mass, energy signature, and general configuration are consistent with our logs of the Orion argosy.”
“Helm,” Vale said, “pursuit course. Keep us at the edge of sensor range, and put us in their warp eddy. Make us look like a sensor echo. Mister Tuvok, relay our sensor data on a scrambled channel to the Wasp and the Canterbury.”
The bridge crew set to work, and Vale headed for her ready room with the intention of briefing Riker on their good fortune—only to be paused by Sarai’s voice. “Captain? A word?”
Vale turned to face her XO. “Number One?”
The first officer lowered her voice to a discreet level. “Captain, I’m glad the tip panned out, but I’m still concerned by the fact that we don’t know who sent it.”
“Don’t we?” She beckoned Sarai with a tilt of her head, then led her off the bridge, into the ready room. When the door closed, Vale continued. “If the tip had proved false, I’d have guessed it was the Orions. But it didn’t. Which leaves only one possibility.” She gave Sarai a moment to process that and deduce the answer for herself.
Sarai looked almost embarrassed when she figured it out. “Brunt.”
“Exactly. Brunt’s a solo operator. Working this far into the Alpha Quadrant frontier, he probably thinks that keeping us and our task force ‘in the game’ as a check against other, better-armed players improves his odds of winning whatever peripheral gambit he’s chasing here.”
“Do you think Brunt’s actually on our side?”
“Of course not. He’s a Ferengi bounty hunter. The only side he’s on is his own. But that doesn’t mean his intel is wrong.”
The other woman wore a look of concern. “If Brunt knows where the Silago-Ekon is going, he’s probably following them, just as we are. Which means his motives are suspect.”
“Absolutely,” Vale said. “He could also be playing both sides. Either way, I have no doubt he’ll stab us in the back if he thinks doing so is even slightly to his advantage.”
Sarai nodded. “I’ll have Tuvok and Rager start looking for Brunt’s ship.”
“You read my mind, Number One.”
Small tools, cables, and interface adapters lay scattered across the working surfaces of the main engineering bay of the Silago-Ekon. Leaning at one end of the table was Nilat, who glared at her chief engineer Proat, a paunchy Denobulan with thick jowls and thicker black eyebrows. She watched him tinker with the settings on a padd, into which he had inserted the isolinear chip she had stolen from the Nausicaans. “How much longer is this going to take?”
He squinted at the padd’s screen. “Not sure. How badly do you want to stay hidden?” He threaded a needlelike tool through a gap in the side of the padd. Poke, poke, poke. “This is a tricky bit of code you’ve brought me—and you were right, it was booby-trapped.”
“I knew it. The Nausicaans always have been a twitchy lot.”
Proat set down his tool and shot her a curious look from under his wild brows. “How quick you are to judge, my captain.” Returning to his work, he added, “If anything, I’d say this looks like the handiwork of the Nausicaans’ Federation hostages. Luckily for you, I had the foresight not to let that chip anywhere near a networked system on the ship, and I isolated this padd before using it to decode the chip’s contents.”
That last detail made Nilat perk up. “Then you were able to decode it.”
“Oh, yes. Quite easily.” He paused to sleeve some perspiration from his forehead and the undersides of his ocular ridges. “Whoever created the chip designed it to be self-unpacking, with a built-in universal translation matrix. Quite elegant, really. Bynar code, if I’m not mistaken.”
“What about the trap? How serious was it?”
“Serious enough,” he said, but his tone was dismissive. “Nothing crippling, but it would’ve turned our own warp coils into a beacon for anyone who knew what to look for.” He isolated a string of code on the padd’s scr
een. “I can strip it out, if you like.”
“Do it,” Nilat said, “but store it offline. We might have use for it someday.”
A broad smile. “My thoughts exactly.” A few more tweaks, and then he presented the padd to Nilat. “There you go. Clean and ready for business.”
She tucked it under her arm. “Well done. If this pans out, I’ll make sure you get an extra half share when we settle up with the Syndicate.”
“Too kind.” The engineer rounded up his tools and began cleaning the work surfaces in the engineering bay, while Nilat headed forward to a ladder.
Less than a minute later she was back on the Silago-Ekon’s command deck with the padd, which she handed to K’mjok. “Proat says it’s working. Isolate a terminal and check it out.”
Her Klingon second-in-command did as he had been told, without asking why he needed to unlink one of the command deck’s terminals from the ship’s network. It was a fact of life in the Orion Syndicate that no one trusted anyone, whether they were business partners, shipmates, lovers, friends, or family. In Nilat’s line of work, trusting people was the fastest way to end up incarcerated or dead. That lesson weighed on her thoughts as she and her crew prepared to make what might well be the most lucrative score of their long, shady careers.
“As we thought,” K’mjok said. He shifted to give Nilat a clear view of the terminal’s screen. “The Federation team made a breakthrough with the Husnock language, and the Nausicaans leveraged it to steal a set of command codes from that crashed warship.”
“And those are the command codes?”
“Yes.” K’mjok switched to another set of data. “I doubt they meant to use the codes on that wreck. I think they found another Husnock ship, one that’s intact.” He keyed in some search parameters and set up a few filters. “Before we fragged their ship, I made sure to download all their flight and comm logs. If we track their movements over the past few months—” He straightened and flashed a fanged grin. “A pattern emerges.”
