by Peter David
Turane had landed this unprofitable, dead-end assignment—an assignment that had sent him and a crew of ten Ferengi misfits to the farthest reaches of Federation space and beyond. Ostensibly, the reason given was that the Ferengi were looking to expand their trade horizons. The Ferengi were annoyed with constantly butting heads with the Federation, and expansion was mandatory if they were to survive as a merchant race. His superiors even had the temerity to tell Turane that this was a plum assignment and that if he were successful in finding new markets, he would be covering himself in glory and profit in the name of the Ferengi.
This he knew to be unadulterated nonsense. The reason he was here was simple. It was his appearance, his coarse manners (coarse even for the Ferengi), his deportment. In fact, in his general, overall being, he was an embarrassment to his brother, who just happened to hold a high rank in the Ferengi command. And his dear, beloved brother had made damned sure, at his earliest opportunity, that Turane be shuffled off to somewhere where he couldn’t do any damage to his brother’s precious career.
So here he was, he and the rest of his crew aboard the marauder ship, in the heart of the Beta Quadrant, at the outer fringes of known space. Within a couple of days they would travel beyond anything that had been explored and exploited by the Ferengi. Just one ship, with no backup, no support, no interest from the central council—no nothing.
Turane’s first officer, Martok, glanced around from his station in response to the low growling that was coming from his commander. “Is something amiss, Daimon?” he asked deferentially.
Turane turned on him with a snarl. “Wrong, Martok? What could possibly be wrong?” He slowly rose from his command chair. “Out in the middle of nowhere, on this profitless voyage—we are a waste, Martok! We have no purpose! We make no profit! There is no life out here. There is no new market. There is no purpose to any of it, other than that my damned brother doesn’t want me around.”
All of this Martok knew, and he wasn’t any happier about it than was Daimon Turane. In fact, he was even less happy about it. With Turane it was a personal dispute that had led him to this unhappy situation. Martok was blameless—he was simply first officer to the wrong Ferengi, at the wrong time.
There had been discussion among Martok and the crew that, sooner or later—later, in all likelihood—the time would come to dispose of Daimon Turane and put someone else in charge. Martok, probably. Turane knew this. The Ferengi command knew this too. Everyone was expecting it, really, and the only reason that Martok had not engineered the change sooner was that—despite his overall unpleasant personality—Turane had headed up some profitable missions in the past. Martok had been his first officer during those escapades, and Martok had something that most Ferengi did not possess—a rudimentary sense of loyalty. This had inclined him to give Daimon Turane as much slack as possible. Perhaps even find a way of salvaging something valuable from this dross of an assignment.
Enough was rapidly becoming enough, however. The crew was growing impatient, and Daimon Turane was slipping further and further into melancholy with every passing day. Martok was going to have to do something because, if he didn’t, officers beneath him were going to take matters into their own hands. He was quite determined that, if some unpleasant fate were to befall the Daimon, he would rather be the engineer of it than a victim.
He started to speak, but before any words got out, the status board lit up. Martok’s head snapped around in surprise, as did Daimon Turane’s. The rest of the bridge crew, which had been lost in their private imaginings of a life without the luckless Daimon Turane, immediately snapped to their assigned duties when encountering something new and unexpected.
“What have we got?” demanded Daimon Turane. For a moment, at least, his lethargy had slipped away. It had been replaced by some of that old excitement, that heart-pounding thrill at possibly discovering something new to be exploited.
Martok was shaking his head in confusion. “They’re so big that at first I thought they were small moons that had somehow broken away from orbit,” he said. “Now I see, though. They’re ships. Incredibly huge ships.”
“On screen,” said Turane, turning in his chair to face the front monitor.
The screen wavered for a split second and then cleared. On it hung three huge cube shapes. They were completely stationary.
“What is it?” whispered Turane, daunted by the immensity of them. “What are they?”
Martok immediately accessed his ship’s computer, scanning all the known ship types. Much of the information had been cobbled, through means fair and foul, from the Federation archives. When the answer to his search came up, he felt all the blood drain from his face. His throat closed up, and he desperately tried to control the impulse to scream in panic. “It’s the Borg,” he said in a voice that was just above a whisper.
Daimon Turane, for his part, seemed utterly nonplussed. “The Borg,” he said thoughtfully, studying the screen. The Borg ships, already huge, were becoming larger as the Ferengi marauder vessel drew closer. “How intriguing.”
“I’ll order full retreat,” said Martok. Across the way, the navigator was already laying in a course to take them back in the other direction.
“You’ll do no such thing,” said Daimon Turane calmly. “Bring us in toward them.”
There was a collective gasp from the bridge crew at Turane’s order. They were regarding their Daimon with outright horror, with as much incredulity as if he’d ordered them to open every accessway and blow the atmosphere out of the ship.
“Toward them?” gasped the navigator in horror.
“Daimon Turane,” said Martok, “this is the Borg. Are you unaware of what they did to the Federation? I heard that fifty ships were destroyed in combat against them at Wolf 359.”
“Seventy-nine,” the navigator said firmly. “I heard seventy-nine, but Starfleet wants to cover it up so the Romulans don’t find out.”
“I also heard about the cover-up,” said the helmsman, now speaking up, “but my sources say eighty-three ships.”
“I don’t care,” snarled Turane, turning on his men, “if the Borg destroyed every ship in the Starfleet. Bring us in there and bring us in there now. Is that clear?”
There was a pause as the bridge crew looked at each other. Everyone was waiting for someone else to make a move.
“Now!” thundered Daimon Turane.
“We’ll be killed,” said Martok quietly.
With slow, deliberate steps, Turane got up from his chair and walked slowly towards Martok. The only sounds heard on the bridge were the soft footfalls of his boots and the steady beeping from the tacticals informing them of the presence of that of which they were already aware. Turane’s lips drew back in the Ferengi approximation of a smile, displaying his double row of sharp, filed teeth.
“We,” said Daimon Turane, “will make more profit than anyone ever imagined possible. That is what we will do. Are you saying you don’t wish to be a part of that?”
“No, but—profit?” said Martok, not understanding.
Daimon Turane nodded slowly. “This is a dead-end ship with a dead-end assignment, Martok. You know it.” He turned to face his bridge crew, his voice rising. “You all know it. There is only one way to live the sort of life respectable for a Ferengi. But to achieve it—to achieve greatness—we must dare greatness. One cannot come without the other. The Borg have power beyond imagining, technology that is decades—even centuries—ahead of us. If we can establish a market with them, trade with them, draw them in as allies with the Ferengi—think of the regard in which we would be held. Think of the respect!” What he did not add was, Think of the putrid expression on my brother’s face.
“But the Federation—”
“Pfaw!” snorted Turane disdainfully. “The Federation does not even know how to deal with us. What in the world makes you think that they could possibly know how to deal with beings such as that,” and he pointed at the Borg ships, which were now a few hundred kilometers
away.
“But if we retreat and inform our council of the Borg presence, wouldn’t that be good enough to—” began the navigator.
Turane cut him off with a quick hand gesture. “ ‘Good enough’ never is,” he said archly. “Now, we go in as a crew and share in the profit, or I go in alone and hoard it all for myself. Which one of you is cowardly enough to turn away from the potential for the greatest, grandest, more incredible payoff in the history of our race?”
The bridge crew looked at each other in silence.
Daimon Turane drew himself up, and when he spoke it was with quiet authority and an apparently unshakable conviction that he would be obeyed. “Take us in,” he said.
The marauder ship moved towards its destination as the three great vessels of the Ferengi hung motionlessly in space.
“The Nanites have lawyers?”
In the Ten-Forward lounge of the Enterprise, Geordi, Riker, and Data were seated around a table, drinks in front of them. Geordi was looking at Riker with open-mouthed disbelief and, having just voiced his incredulity, felt constrained to repeat it. “The Nanites went out and got lawyers? You can’t be serious!”
“They didn’t ‘go out and get lawyers,’ Geordi,” Riker told him. Although he could understand the chief engineer’s annoyance and ire, he hated to admit that he found it mildly amusing at the same time. “The lawyers were assigned to them by the Federation council.”
Geordi’s hands dropped to the armrests of his chair, and he shook his head. “This is nuts. This is just crazy.”
“Geordi, I don’t see where—”
“I’m sorry, Commander, but with all due respect, this stinks,” Geordi said in frustration. “Wesley and I worked our tails off to get together all the research material on the Nanites that Starfleet had requested. Everyone said this was it—the key to defeating the Borg. Just breed them, introduce them into the Borg systems, and the Nanites would do the rest. It’s something so plain that—”
“Even a blind man could see it?” said Riker ruefully.
Geordi nodded slowly. “Yeah. That simple. So here I thought that by now, certainly they would have bred more than enough Nanites to stop the entire Borg race if they showed up. Instead, you’re telling me that Step One hasn’t been taken because it’s tied up in some sort of debate in the council!”
“But if what Commander Riker is saying is correct, Geordi—and I assume it to be,” Data added affably, “there are many in the Federation council who feel strongly about Nanite rights.”
Before Geordi could start again, Riker stepped in quickly. “The argument has been,” he said, “that breeding a race of sentient beings, such as the Nanites, for the express purpose of war and destruction is contrary to all the Federation principles and beliefs. The goal of the Federation is to promote galactic harmony. Creating a ‘warrior race’—even a highly specialized warrior race such as the Nanites—would undercut everything that the Federation purports to be about.”
“But—”
“There is also the view that it eliminates the free will of the Nanites, if they are being created specifically to fight the Borg. Not to mention, what if the Borg actually managed to absorb the Nanites somehow? Overwhelm them? It’s not impossible. We don’t know what the full capability of the Borg is. If they did eliminate them somehow, then we will have created a race specifically to die en masse. What does that make us?”
“People trying to survive,” said Geordi. “Has the council considered the fact that if the Federation is wiped out by the Borg, then all our high-minded principles won’t matter a bit? I’d like to see how quickly some of those council members would change their minds if they’d been aboard the Enterprise, staring down the sights of Borg weaponry.”
“For what it’s worth, some members of the council agree with you, Mr. La Forge,” said Riker. “Enough to cause some fairly lively debates, from my understanding. But until the council gets it sorted out and comes to an agreement one way or the other, there’s a hold on developing Nanites for protection against the Borg.” He leaned forward and said, “Look, Geordi—if the Nanites rights argument rubs you the wrong way, try this…”
Riker paused to take a sip of his drink, but Geordi was so frustrated that he didn’t trust himself to speak. Riker continued, “There’s also the concern that it’s too much like germ warfare. Once released, there’s no guarantee that the Nanites might not turn on us. We might wind up with something just as dangerous as the Borg. Would you be willing to take that risk?”
“Risk the Nanites versus risking the Borg? Yeah. In a minute.” Geordi shook his head. “I still think it stinks, Commander. If the Borg could be put out of commission by the Nanites, then we should do it.”
“Geordi,” said Data thoughtfully, “there was discussion given to the notion of replicating me. The purpose was exploration. But what if Starfleet advocated the idea of creating a race of beings—beings who thought and felt, and seemed indistinguishable from me—for the sole purpose of sending those beings off to fight a war? Would that be acceptable to you?”
Geordi frowned. “Well…no.”
“Why not?”
Geordi called into his mind’s eye the image of Data—or how he perceived Data—numbering in the thousands, armed with heavy-duty weaponry, slogging through some marsh somewhere in some godforsaken world. Or a shipload of Datas flying into combat, secure in the knowledge that if the ship were destroyed and all hands died, it wouldn’t…matter.
“Because you deserve better than that,” said Geordi softly.
“And are the Nanites any less deserving?” asked Data.
Geordi sighed heavily. “I suppose not. But still…it’s frustrating to have the ability to solve your problems right there, in your hand, and you—”
“Can’t make the fist?” offered Riker.
“Yeah. You can’t make the fist,” said Geordi.
Riker held his glass up and, in an overt effort to change the topic and tone of the conversation, announced in stentorian tones, “What see I before me but an empty glass. That, gentlemen, is an abysmal state of affairs that cannot be tolerated.” He turned toward the bar behind which Guinan customarily stood....
Except the Ten-Forward hostess wasn’t there. Riker glanced around to see where she might be, and then he spotted her on the far side of the room.
She was sitting by herself.
For some reason this looked odd to Riker, and he tried to figure out why. Then it came to him—he’d never seen her sitting by herself. Usually she stood behind the bar, and on those occasions when she was sitting, it was always across a table from someone else. She would be there listening in that way she had, taking in what was being said and dispensing advice in that calm, matter-of-fact manner that always made it seem absurd that you hadn’t solved your dilemma yourself.
Not this time, though. She was seated in a corner, staring out a viewing bay at the passing stars. There was something wrong with her. If Riker had been possessed of psychic powers, he might have said that something was dampening her aura.
He stood and said, “Excuse me a moment,” without even looking at Geordi and Data. He toyed for a moment with the notion of mentioning his concern about Guinan to Deanna, or perhaps to Picard, who had such a long-standing relationship with Guinan—a relationship murky in its origins.
No. He was here. She was here. And a friendly chat was no more than a friendly chat. Perhaps even Guinan had the right to be just a little down in the mouth for once. But she’d been there for him enough times, and he felt it incumbent upon him to return the favor.
He walked across Ten-Forward and stood next to Guinan. She didn’t appear to notice him at all. That immediately turned the alarm level up a notch for Riker. Guinan noticed everything. “Guinan?” he said.
She glanced up at him wanly. “Hello, Commander.”
“Do you mind if I—” He gestured to the empty seat opposite her. She inclined her head slightly and he sat. “Is there a problem?” he asked.
She smiled, but the smile didn’t touch her eyes. “Isn’t that usually my line?” she asked.
“Times change,” said Riker. “People change.”
“Some do,” Guinan replied, and then paused. “Others stay the same.” She stood and it was with some visible effort, leaning on the table for support.
Her clearly enervated condition now brought Riker to his feet, and he promptly dispensed with the pleasant demeanor of concerned friend. That he most certainly was, but now, first and foremost, he was an officer of the Enterprise, and he knew an ill crewman when he saw one. “Guinan, what is going on with you? You look weak as a kitten.”
“I haven’t been…resting well,” she said. “That’s all. Nothing to concern yourself about. I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
“I think you should consider sharing it with someone. If not me, then Captain Picard, or Counselor Troi.”
“It’s…” She took a deep breath, as if incapable of finishing the sentence with the air she had in her lungs. “It’s nothing that can’t be…”
Her eyes seemed to glaze over, her voice trailing off in mid-sentence. “Guinan!” Riker said sharply.
She turned towards him, acting as if his voice had come from a long distance, and then she pitched forward into his arms. Her arm swung loosely down and knocked a stray glass off a table.
Immediately everyone in Ten-Forward was on their feet. Guinan had been the rock of the Ten-Forward lounge. To see this happen to her was absolutely staggering.
Riker caught her with one arm and with his free hand tapped his communicator. “Riker to sickbay!” he said rapidly and, without waiting for the acknowledgment, said, “Guinan’s passed out. I’m bringing her down. Have a team ready.”
“Guinan?” came the incredulous voice of Bev Crusher. The sense that she had of Guinan was the same as everyone else’s, namely that she was somehow immune from whatever frailties might plague humans. “Guinan passed out?” Clearly, she wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly.
“We’re on our way. Riker out.”