Morn nodded and pointed to a small, cobweb-covered box.
Chapter 27
It’s all over when the Lurian leaves your bar. That’s how the saying went, anyway.
Quark leaned against the doorframe of Rom’s guest quarters, watching his brother pack. Somehow he couldn’t get that old saying—and the feeling that there was some truth to it—out of his head.
He’d had his ups and downs in business since Morn disappeared. Made a little latinum, lost a little latinum. Enjoyed a few laughs, shed a few tears. Gotten closer to Laren . . . moved farther away from Laren. Planned big plans—and seen his dreams shot down in flames.
Nothing felt quite “right” since the Lurian had left. Quark wouldn’t go so far as to call him a good luck charm . . . but Morn had been a friend. One he could confide in, and confess his occasional screwups to. But where was he now, now that Quark could really use that small sympathetic ear?
On the other hand, this is all his fault. If Morn hadn’t screwed up doing one tiny little favor for Zek, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Oh, who was he kidding? It was his own fault. If he hadn’t forced Rom to bring the scroll, no one ever would have realized it was a fake. And Rom wouldn’t be the most hated Nagus since Smeet.
“You don’t have to go back, you know,” he said to Rom. “You don’t like all that bureaucratic stuff anyway.”
“I have to go back, Brother,” Rom responded absently. He was looking for something that apparently wasn’t in the drawers or under the bed. “We’ve been over all this. I have to face the Board.” He looked around the room, a frown on his face, followed quickly by a relieved smile when he spotted the edge of Leeta’s pink nightgown hanging over the back of a chair—the one in which Zek was snoozing. He approached the old man quietly and pulled the gown out from under him.
Zek continued to snore.
“Besides,” Rom said, turning to Quark as he folded the delicate lingerie, “what would I do here?”
“You could work in the bar,” Quark said. “Maybe . . . I’d make you a partner. You always wanted that.”
“You don’t even know if you’re going to have the bar after the Liquidators and the FCA get done with us,” Rom said.
“We could start a new one somewhere else. I hear Risa’s looking to rebuild—”
“I wouldn’t want to raise Bena on—” Rom started.
But the mood changed when their mother rushed into the room, holding Bena’s small wrist firmly in her white-knuckled grasp. “You are in so much trouble,” Ishka kept repeating to the little girl, who didn’t look at all sorry for whatever infraction she’d committed.
“What happened?” asked Rom, aghast at how agitated the old woman seemed.
“I found her in a dark corridor,” Ishka began. “She was talking to a stranger!”
“Whaaaaat?” cried Leeta, exiting the room’s refresher with a bag of toiletries. “Bena did what?”
Bena frowned. “It wasn’t a dark corridor. It was over by the jumja-on-a-stick kiosk. I was going to buy Daddy a jumja to cheer him up.”
“But you were talking to a stranger, weren’t you?” insisted Ishka. “A big, hulking thing ready to snatch her up and carry her off!” She stopped to catch her breath. “I started yelling and he ran away.”
Leeta dropped to her knees in front of her daughter. “Oh, sweetie! You know better than—”
Bena rolled her pretty eyes, the ones that reminded Rom so much of his wife’s. “He wasn’t strange!” she protested. “He was nice. Real nice. Grandmoogie is ’zaggerating! Moogie, you said yourself that she always ’zaggerates.”
“What?” Ishka shouted. “You told her that?”
“Shhh,” said Leeta. “I need to hear what Bena has to say. What else did this—” Leeta gulped, concerned for her daughter’s welfare but trying to remain calm. “What else did this big man do?”
Bena held out a pretty picnic basket, woven from slender katterpod branches. “He gave me this.”
Ishka gasped so loudly that she woke up Zek. “I swear I didn’t see that, or I would have taken it directly to station security!” she said.
“Bena!” chided Rom. “You know better than to take things from strangers!”
“But it’s not for me!” Bena responded. “The man asked me to give it to Uncle Quark.”
She held the basket toward Quark, who approached the little girl hesitantly. “To me?” he said, his voice quavering slightly. He wasn’t all that inclined to take things from strangers either. Still, he couldn’t leave Bena holding a potentially unsafe item—not with Rom giving him that imploring look.
Quark sucked in a deep breath and delicately lifted the basket away from Bena’s hands. Slowly, and gently, he placed it on the table. Then he looked at his family. “Well,” he said, faking a smile. “Let’s just see what my . . . ‘secret admirer’ sent, shall we?” Glancing around the room, he spotted Zek’s favorite flitterbird claw backscratcher, and he reached to pick it up.
“Hey!” said Zek. “That’s mine.”
“You’ll get it back,” Quark responded through gritted teeth. And he extended the claw toward the basket to flip open the lid.
Nothing hissed, caught fire, or went boom. He moved closer to the basket, just a little, and stood on tiptoe so he could peek inside from his vantage point. Then Quark gasped, his eyes bulging.
“What . . . what is it, Brother?” asked Rom.
Quark reached inside the basket and retrieved a beautifully decorated cylinder.
This time everyone in the room gasped—except for Zek, who walked over to retrieve his backscratcher. He glanced at the item Quark was holding. “Oh! You found my scroll,” he said.
“Scanner!” shouted Quark, unwilling to take his eyes from this “gift” for fear it would vanish. Rom began pulling things out of the bag he’d been packing, flinging them in every direction. “I can’t find mine!” he cried. As the adults in the room began searching for their own scanners—no good Ferengi ever went anywhere without one—Bena calmly walked to her travel case and retrieved her prize possession: the pink “My Little Scanner” that Rom and Leeta had given her on her last birthday. It was child-size, made for little hands, but fully functional.
She handed it to Quark, who immediately activated it.
The room was deathly still while he removed the scroll from the container and scanned it; then he reeled backward and sat down hard on the bed. “It’s real,” he said, scarcely believing it could be true. “It’s the real thing!”
“I’m saved!” shouted Rom, and Leeta rushed over to hug him.
“My scroll,” said Zek, reaching for it.
Ishka gently smacked his hand. “You leave that alone,” she warned.
Bena glanced inside the basket. “There’s still something in there, Uncle Quark.” And she handed it to him.
It was just a small box, with a thin layer of wrapping material around it. Quark removed the wrapping and opened it. What he saw surprised him even more than the scroll had.
“It’s Dilb the Destitute,” he said, holding up a tiny action figure for everyone to see. “The only Marauder Mo figure I don’t have. I never bothered to collect him because he was destitute. No Ferengi child wanted him! He was the least collected toy in the set. The manufacturer destroyed most of them.” He stared at it in disbelief. “Very few of them survived the purge—so now it’s the most valuable toy to collectors.”
“And it’s still in the original box,” Ishka noted approvingly. “This was sent by a very considerate person.”
Leeta put her hands on Bena’s tiny shoulders and smiled down at her. “Who gave this to you, darling?”
“I don’t know his name,” she admitted. “He was a great big man with a big sad face. He said to tell you and Daddy and Grampa Zek he was sorry.”
“Did he have freakishly tiny ears?�
� interjected Zek.
The others continued talking, but Quark just stared at the action figure. Somewhere deep inside, the usual feeling of regret over having lost a good customer gave way to a glimmer of hope.
Maybe, the barkeeping ambassador thought, this means he’ll be coming back . . . someday.
Chapter 28
In a seedy saloon on the backwater planet of Zaurak II, a lone customer quietly snoozed with his head on the bar and his fingers encircling the stem of an empty glass.
Walking over to check on the big fellow, the proprietor pitched his voice just loud enough to pierce the customer’s dreams and asked, “Would you like another?”
He sat up, looked around to get his bearings, glanced at the empty glass, and nodded. While the bartender mixed his drink, the customer gazed blankly at a small screen that was streaming a Terran fencing match. The volume was set at a low level that allowed him to understand the announcer, but he didn’t feel the need to listen. The game seemed rather dainty, with its skinny swords and dancelike moves. Nothing anyone would play on Luria.
The bartender brought his new drink and moved back down the bar. One of the players on the screen touched the other with the tip of his weapon; the fighters both dropped their arms; and a stream of product promotions, colorful but meaningless, jiggled across the screen. Then the FNS logo spun into place and an anonymous voice announced a newsbreak. Instantly, the face of a white-haired Efrosian male appeared on the screen.
“Well, the search for the missing scroll of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition seems to be over,” the Efrosian said, his expression showing little interest in the subject.
The customer leaned forward, tilting his small ear toward the monitor, now straining to hear. “Grand Nagus Rom has returned to Ferenginar with the recovered scroll, which has apparently been missing for . . . fourteen years.” The Efrosian paused here and glanced at someone off-camera, as if to ask, “Could that number possibly be right?”
He cleared his throat and continued. “The Ferengi Board of Liquidators states that it is inclined to accept his explanation of the recovery, pending the results of a perfunctory hearing.
“In other news . . .”
The customer smiled. Lifting his glass at the baffled bartender as if in a toast, he took a tiny sip. Then he laid his head back on the bar, closed his eyes, and began to snore.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Paula M. Block and Terry J. Erdmann are the co-authors of the ebook novella Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Lust’s Latinum Lost (And Found). They have also written the nonfiction books Star Trek Costumes: Five Decades of Fashion from the Final Frontier; Star Trek Pop-Ups; Star Trek The Original Topps Trading Card Series; Star Trek: The Next Generation 365; Star Trek: The Original Series 365; Star Trek 101; Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion; The Secrets of Star Trek: Insurrection; The Magic of Tribbles; and Star Trek: Action! Their additional titles include Monk: The Official Episode Guide and The 4400 Companion. As a licensing director for Paramount Pictures, Paula was co-editor of the Pocket Books short-story series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. During his career in film publicity, Terry authored The Last Samurai Official Companion. They live in southern Oregon with their two collies, Shadow and Mandy.
FOR MORE ON THESE AUTHORS:
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Paula-M-Block
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Terry-J-Erdmann
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ISBN 978-1-5011-1068-9
Rules of Accusation Page 12
