by Dayton Ward
Flanked by the Breen, Gaila and Brunt made their way up to the bridge. Two Breen halted to stand guard on either side of the doors, and the others disappeared somewhere into another corridor. The bridge was small but comfortable, with a plush command couch on a raised platform. A small minibar was built into it. There were consoles on either side, and a flight console at the narrow nose of the bridge, with a reclining chair set into a cockpit-like enclosure sunk slightly into the floor. There was also a console standing free, having been pulled out from the wall. Sounds of clattering and indistinct cursing indicated that some sort of repairs were in progress.
A short, slim Ferengi sat in the sunken cockpit, making preparations to leave orbit. He looked to be rather small-lobed, and Brunt was surprised that Gaila had employed someone without real business lobes. Then again, perhaps a pilot didn’t need such business acumen, so long as he had worked out a good deal on fares.
Another Ferengi came in, carrying a large container of tools and parts. Brunt paled; this was the biggest Ferengi he had ever seen—even larger than the Klingon that he used to see occasionally on Deep Space 9. “Where do you want these, Gaila?” he asked in a deep yet mild voice.
“Take them down to engineering, Bijon.”
“Oh, right.”
“Bijon, wait.” Gaila said quickly. “I want you to meet someone. This is Brunt, my new partner.”
Brunt stepped forward. “Brunt, FC— just Brunt,” he finished uncomfortably.
“Hallo, Brunt.” Bijon put the box down and pressed his wrists together, cupping his hands. Gaila cleared his throat and jerked his head toward the door. Bijon took the hint, picked up his box, and left.
“Bijon is a useful … factotum,” Gaila said, “but he needs constant direction to remain focused.” He went over to the cockpit and looked down. “Pel, are we ready to leave orbit?”
What Brunt had taken to be an effeminate young Ferengi at the helm turned around and rose. He was simultaneously repulsed and intrigued to see that the lobeless pilot was actually female. A clothed female, wearing a sporty pilot’s jumpsuit. He didn’t try to hide the scowl of disapproval that crossed his face. “Just about,” she said eagerly. She had the tone of voice of someone who loved their means of earning profit; Brunt had to give her that. “Voloczin is just installing a few more hardware updates that he picked up while we were here.” She looked in the direction of the console that had been uprooted from its position. “Voloczin,” Pel said, “is the initializer linkage fixed now?”
“It’s kushti,” a somewhat mechanical voice said from below. A thick tentacle, covered in parchment-like skin, reached up from the access hatch and around the console. It looked like an agglomeration of all the braised slugs Brunt had feasted upon when he was a regular patron of Ferenginar’s finest restaurants. For a moment he thought he was hallucinating. Then another tentacle joined the first, and another, and another … The tentacles tensed, and levered up a fluked torso from the crawlspace below. If a hew-mon had been on board, he might have described it as something between a spider, a crab, and an octopus.
“Wotcher,” it said. The translator that gave its voice a noticeable mechanical bent flickered on a beak, half hidden under a fold beneath its one baleful eye. There were belts of tools, wide enough to go around a hew-mon waist, around the thickest parts of the tentacles, nearest the body. “Fresh meat, eh?”
“My new partner,” Gaila agreed.
“Another one?” Pel exclaimed. Gaila glared at her.
Brunt finally found his voice again. “What is … that?”
Pel looked studiously blank. “An engineer. What else would he be, with all those tools?”
“I meant, what sort of … What species is he?”
Gaila looked at Voloczin and opened his mouth to express his pride in the quality of his employees, but then closed it and shrugged. “Actually, I haven’t a clue. Nobody’s ever asked before.” He shrugged off the question. “Anyway, welcome to our little enterprise. My associates are, as I said, the right small group of people.” Pel and Voloczin returned to what they were doing.
Brunt lowered his voice. “Females making profit … wearing clothes.” He gave a theatrical shudder. “This is what happens when the Nagus is kin to the likes of Quark. No offense.”
“None taken. At least you don’t have to stand having that blood in you.” Gaila said darkly. “I can almost feel it poisoning me as I speak.”
“Might as well turn the whole treasury over to a hew-mon and be done with it.”
“Urgh. Hew-mons invented subprime!” Gaila spat.
“Give that idiot Rom time, and he’ll probably manage it.”
“Don’t even joke about that. Besides, Pel may be allowed to earn profit, but who do you think invests it for her?”
“Ah.” Brunt grinned understandingly, as did Gaila.
“The hew-mons have a saying: ’A sprat to catch a mackerel’—they’re some kind of aquatic food animals, I think. So I use Pel’s little bit of profit to bring myself more.” Brunt merely nodded; that was how a proper Ferengi should behave, after all. “Come on, I’ll show you your cabin, then we’ll discuss where we make our first deal.”
Gaila took Brunt down one deck and past three doors to a suite of rooms that were even more richly appointed than his home on Ferenginar had been at the height of his powers as FCA Liquidator. Objets d’art were on display, and there was a gleam of gold and latinum everywhere. There was a little office filled with accountancy paraphernalia, and a bedroom with a massive fur-strewn bed. “Nice little home from home, eh?” Gaila said.
“It’s passable,” Brunt said quickly.
“Get freshened up if you want, then meet me on the bridge and we’ll decide on a course.”
An hour or so later, Brunt returned to the bridge. Bijon was standing by a console, watching the displays, while Pel was seated in the cockpit. Gaila, on the command couch, beckoned Brunt to sit. “Snail juice?” he offered, replicating Brunt a glass from the minibar next to him. Brunt took it. “Now, I’ve been orbiting Ferenginar for too long. It’s time to get back out there and seek out new profits.”
“Rumor has it that there’s been a coup on Fonnam II,” Brunt said. “No doubt the original government will be looking to counter it and dispose of their traitors. And of course the new government will want to strengthen their hold and dispose of their traitorous counterplotters . . .”
“That’s the kind of level we want,” Gaila agreed, “to offload the last of last season’s product and raise capital. Fonnam is not such a good option, though; they’re notorious for wanting long credit terms.”
“No good for raising capital, then,” Brunt agreed. “No, we want a planet with hard latinum to spend.” His mind was working furiously. Was there anything in his stolen FCA files that could help? He took his padd from his pocket and looked at it, keeping its display away from Gaila’s view. “Kalanis Major,” he said hungrily. “They recently converted a lot of escrow into latinum, and there is a civil war running, with no sign of an end in sight.”
“Perfect!” Gaila exclaimed, rubbing his hands. “Pel, set course for Kalanis Major, and engage.”
“Kalanis Major . . .” she echoed. “It’ll take four days at warp seven.”
“Good enough.”
Four days of travel meant Brunt had time to get to know the ship. The first thing he learned was that his bedroom shared a bulkhead with the ship’s computer core. Computer cores were solid state, of course, with no moving parts above the subatomic level, but the one that shared a wall with Brunt’s cabin still somehow contrived to make occasional noises. They were small sounds—a crackle here, a distant metallic pop there—but just random enough to be unpredictable and therefore annoying.
As a result he couldn’t sleep on the first night, and found himself touring the ship. Occasionally the Breen soldiers would look at him silently, but they didn’t challenge him, and he hoped—if not prayed—that Gaila had told them he was on their side. He wondered
how many Breen there were on board; their identical uniforms and face-covering helmets made it impossible to tell them apart or count the number of individuals.
He found that the ship had a large engineering deck, but Voloczin was the only engineer on board. There were vast cargo holds taking up most of the volume of the ship, and several large-scale replicator units programmed for weapons production.
There were a lot of automated systems overall, so the ship clearly didn’t need a large living crew. Brunt didn’t think that much of it. In his opinion, profit-making needed an audience. There just didn’t seem to be as much fun in being surrounded by automatic systems that couldn’t admire you or feel inspired to earn their own profit or, indeed, be jealous of how profitable and ruthless you were.
The only audience aboard most of the ship was the Breen, and they didn’t seem to care. Brunt caught up with Gaila at breakfast in the gilded dining chamber to ask him about them. The chamber was reminiscent of a good Ferengi restaurant, but with replicators.
“Do you trust the Breen?”
“Of course,” Gaila scoffed. “They’re utterly incorruptible.”
“Really?” Brunt wondered whether this was an opinion worth testing.
“Well, for one thing, nobody wants to hire soldiers who fought on the wrong side of the Dominion War. Secondly, they’re not easy to communicate with, without specialized equipment. Thirdly, I pay them more than anyone else could afford.”
Brunt nodded. That, he could understand; it was the best way to secure loyalty. He still didn’t like them, though.
“You’re a pilot,” Brunt asked. He was trying, more or less, to keep the disdain out of his voice, and as a result, the question came out as something of a squeak.
Pel looked up from the cockpit. The ship was on course on its own, so she was there merely to check that the instruments were working correctly and to see whether any gravitational fluctuations had necessitated a course change.
“I am now.”
“I didn’t think females were allowed to—Well, until recently.”
“I wasn’t always a pilot.”
“Ah, that’s good to hear. You used to be a proper female?”
“I used to be in the service industry. Trying to make my way up to becoming a proper businessperson. I had the confidence of—” She chuckled, ignoring Brunt’s rictus of a smile. “Well, one day I had to give all that up.”
“How did you become a pilot?”
“By necessity. Necessity is always the mother of profit.” She relaxed, her eyes focusing on something only she could see. “I was stranded on Solamin Prime during the Dominion War. Everyone had to do something to keep things running, and I ended up catering for the shuttle pilots. One of them liked me enough to want to show me how to fly the shuttles. At first I wasn’t interested. There was no profit in it. But then I tried it, and found I was a natural. And when I qualified, people would pay for side trips or deliveries. . . . It was more profitable than I ever imagined.”
“How nice for you.”
“Now I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”
“Not even being a—”
“A skivvy? A servant? Oh, you were going to say ’a traditional Ferengi female,’ weren’t you?”
“Maybe,” Brunt said, sounding defensive. She smiled to herself, knowing that she was everything a man like Brunt hated. She knew who he was, of course; his feud with Quark had become legendary among Ferengi. It was true that Brunt was a good if somewhat inflexible Ferengi, but he was no Quark. It was easy enough for Gaila and Brunt to make profit when everything was weighted in their favor, but Quark could make profit out of absolutely nothing. There would never be another like him.
After four days in flight, the Golden Handshake dropped out of warp and swept into a parking orbit around Kalanis Major. The planet was an average Class-M world with three moons. Sensors had no difficulty picking up the signs of conflict on the surface.
Thankfully, they also had no difficulty making contact with the leaders of three factions. The existence of a third faction had come as a surprise, but Brunt, Gaila, Bijon, and Pel all took it as a sign that their venture was looked upon favorably. The Great Material Continuum was flowing their way, and they need only enjoy the cruise.
Gaila had set up a meeting with the government faction for first thing the morning after they arrived in orbit. Brunt then contacted the old Loyalists and arranged a meeting with them for lunchtime. Since there was a third faction, and Bijon had trouble counting that far, they reluctantly let Pel arrange the rendezvous with the counterrevolutionaries that evening.
When the Minister of Procurement and his entourage materialized on the transporter pad, Gaila stepped forward to greet them. They were humanoid, roughly the size of a hew-mon or a tall Ferengi, but reptilian, with armored foreheads and scaly skin. They wore red armor and harness. “Greetings, Minister. I’m Gaila, representative of Gailtek Armaments and Technologies. This is my partner, Brunt, and our clerk, Pel. Whatever you require, we at GAT will do our best to fulfill the order.”
“We need weapons.” The minister had a female voice, though it was hard to tell if this was truly indicative of its gender.
“Obviously, or you wouldn’t be contacting an arms dealer.”
“Quite so.” She—Gaila decided to think of her as she—hesitated. “We’d prefer the most efficient killing machines possible.”
Gaila pursed his lips for a moment. “I probably shouldn’t try to influence a client’s choice,” he began slowly, “but it strikes me that you don’t really want weapons of mass destruction.”
“We don’t?”
“You can’t exploit what you’ve destroyed,” Gaila said reasonably. “No, what you need in order to deal with your undesirable rivals”—as if there was ever such a thing as a desirable rival—“is urban pacification equipment. Crowd control.” He led the delegation first to a display room, filled with both physical specimens and holographic images of Klingon weaponry. Disruptor pistols and rifles of various designs filled the racks and tables.
The minister picked up one, a rifle with a three-pronged barrel and a heavy stock. “This disruptor rifle . . .”
“Ah,” Gaila began silkily. “Klingon Type 47, the very best there is. When you absolutely, positively have to disintegrate every mother-creditor in the room … accept no substitute!”
The minister hefted the rifle. It was finished in black, rather than the red and silver more typical of Klingon weaponry. “It doesn’t look Klingon.”
“We’ve commissioned this upgraded variant to have a seamless outer casing that dampens the weapon’s energy signature, making it less detectable by scanning devices. . . .”
Brunt tuned out Gaila’s excellent pitch as his communicator buzzed. He stepped away from the group and brought it to his ear. “What?”
“The Loyalists are at the transport site,” Bijon’s voice came over happily. Brunt was immediately alarmed; the last thing he needed was two rival groups on board at the same time. “I’m bringing them up now,” Bijon went on.
“No!” Brunt called frantically. The others looked around at him. Cursing Bijon for being even more stupid than Quark’s miserable tribe, Brunt smiled weakly and addressed Gaila. “That was Bijon,” he said meaningfully. “He has acquired some more … credit.” Gaila’s eyes widened, and he paled.
“Go and see to it,” Gaila hissed. Brunt practically ran out the door.
Gaila smiled back at the minister, knowing all too well what might happen now. He still had nightmares about the time Quark caused the Regent of Palamar and General Nassuc to meet at a deal he was brokering with the Regent. It had taken months to shake off the Purification Squads.
“A matter of paperwork that is due,” Gaila said silkily. “My junior partner will deal with it so that we can continue our negotiations. If you’ll come this way, we can take refreshments in the dining hall, and see what we can do for you.” He indicated another doorway than the one by which they had enter
ed, and turned to Pel. “Have Voloczin reset the chamber for Cardassian weapons,” he whispered. She stayed behind, opening her communicator, as Gaila ushered the minister’s group out.
Brunt tried to smile as the Loyalist group marched toward him, their green armor making them look half naked. “I am Commander Lotral of the Kalanis Defense Arm,” the leader said, also in a femalesounding voice. Somehow this fit with the slightly nude impression given by the color of their armor, and Brunt felt a tiny bit more comfortable.
“I’m Brunt, GIT. Sorry, GAT.”
“G—?”
“Gailtek Armaments and Technologies.” Brunt said. “You’re a little early, but that’s not a problem, is it? The early investor reaps the most interest, after all.”
“Really?”
“Rule of Acquisition number thirty-seven. It’s the code we Ferengi live by.”
“Good for you.” The commander followed Brunt into the corridor. The door to the transporter room had only just closed when Brunt heard the worst sound he could imagine right now: Bijon’s voice, too muffled to make out the words, and the whine of the ship’s transporter. Brunt felt as if the contents of his stomach were about to fall out and go clean through the floor. Thankfully, none of the commander’s group seemed to have heard the sound, and Brunt was grateful that not every species had Ferengi ears or Ferengi hearing. He hastily opened the nearest door, which turned out to be the door to his own quarters. “This is … the executive lounge,” he said hurriedly, and opened up the replicator and bar that were against one wall. “Please make yourselves at home, while I check with my secretary that the display models have been prepared.”
He ducked back out and locked the door, praying that none of the commander’s people would try to leave and find this out. He ran back to the transporter room, and sure enough, a third group of Kalani were just stepping down from the pads. This lot wore a mix of differently colored armor and harness, presumably acquired from wherever they could find them.
