by Dayton Ward
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.”
“Who says they supply only us?”
The Alphan prime minister and his Board of Directors were gathered in his office. A large hologram of an unconscious Pel and a soldier holding one of the Betan weapons was flickering in the center of the room.
“Contact Gaila,” the prime minister ordered.
“He’s already on the line,” one of his aides said, surprised.
“Gaila—”
“Prime Minister,” Gaila said urgently from thin air. “I must warn you! I have uncovered evidence that one of my crew has been stealing from me, and may be trying to sell to one of the other factions. I’m transmitting the details of her shuttle to your military—”
“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.”
Last Month
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.”
