"If they're producing antimatter waste on this scale, that's not surprising. Anything else?"
"Fully ninety percent of the ship is dedicated to cargo space. Based on its size and configuration, I be-lieve the ship is a barge for the hazardous material."
"And they decided they had a perfect dumping
ground." Kira felt revulsion build up in her gut and work its way to her extremities, which she had to keep from shaking. Even at their absolute worst, the Cardas-sians never did anything so repugnant as to dump highly toxic material into a populated region. "It must've thrilled them when the gateway opened. I wonder if they even bothered to see if mere was an inhabited planet on the other side." A brief urge came over Kira to lock the runabout's phasers on the ship and destroy it just to teach these people-whoever they were-a les-son. She set the impulse aside. "What else?"
"There are no docking ports. They also have an un-usual shield configuration."
"Unusual how?"
"There are seven of them, though most are offline right now. They appear to have been enhanced in some way. I've never seen a design like this."
Kira noticed that there was none of the scientific curiosity she would expect from, say, Nog or Shar in Taran'atar's tone. He was simply reporting the facts as he saw them.
The Jem'Hadar continued, "At present, most of their systems are offline. I am not reading any life signs."
Blinking, Kira said, "None at all? That ship's got to have a crew of at least several hundred. Could the ra-diation be interfering?"
"The radiation could not interfere so much as to mask that many Me signs, Colonel."
Shaking her head, Kira looked down at the display. They had a little over two hours before the mass would go through the gateway, so there was time to figure something out. But what? With no tractor beam and no way to destroy it effectively...
Then she noticed something. "I'm reading some debris. Sensors say it's primarily irradiated monota-nium-along with organic matter. Looks like a ship was destroyed by the waste."
"A ship with a monotanium hull," Taran'atar mused. "Even the Dominion was never able to refine enough monotanium to make spacecraft from it."
Kira couldn't resist. "Looks like the Dominion doesn't have the market on high technology."
"It would seem so."
Growing serious once again, Kira said, "Still, if even a monotanium ship couldn't hold up to that waste, Europa Nova won't, either."
"There is a Class-M planet in this system," Taran'atar said, "less than a million kilometers from our position. There are, however, no high-order life signs."
Kira took a deep breath. "All right, I'm going to as-sume that someone is alive over there." She opened a channel. "Unidentified vessel, this is the Federation runabout Euphrates. Respond please."
There was no reply.
"This is the Federation Runabout Euphrates con-tacting unidenti-"
"The tanker's systems are coming online," Taran'atar said suddenly. "Weapons are powering up-"
"Raise shields," Kira said half a second before the weapons fire struck the runabout. She immediately sent the Euphrates onto an evasive course that would take them farther away from the radioactive waste.
"Shields at sixty percent," Taran'atar said. "Shall I return fire?"
Kira hesitated only for a second. The Jem'Hadar
was bred for combat. So why not let him do what he does best?
"Do it," Kira said, and as she piloted the Euphrates away from the tanker, another salvo of weapons fire struck the runabout.
"Shields are down," Taran'atar called over the din of alarms. "Shield generators offline."
"Lucky shot," Kira muttered.
"No, Colonel," Taran'atar said. "That shot was carefully aimed and modulated. Our opponent knew precisely where and how hard to strike."
Before Kira could respond to that, the runabout faded into an incoherent jumble. Her body suddenly felt disconnected from reality. The sounds of the alarms in the runabout faded, the feel of the cushioned seat under her dissolved. It was akin to being trans-ported, but that didn't come with such a feeling of dis-orientation-of removal from reality.
For a brief instant that felt like it would never end, she was nowhere, felt nothing, was nothing.
Then, slowly, her senses returned. Except what she now felt beneath her was hard, cold metal; she was lying down instead of sitting, and her hands were now bound behind her back. Instinctively, she struggled against her bonds, but they did not yield.
She no longer heard alarms, but she did hear the constant thrum of a ship's systems. The ship, however, was not the Euphrates. The silvery-blue colors that Starfleet favored had been replaced by dark browns and greens-the latter accentuated by the dim green lights on the ceiling. She saw unfamiliar interfaces and a smaller, cruder style of screen-a rounder design than the usual flatscreen displays Kira was accustomed
to. A green-tinged miasma hovered in the very air of the ship, and it smelled like someone was burning plastiform. The gloom was palpable.
Adding to it were the three humanoid corpses which also lay on the deck. Golden-skinned, wearing bulky uniforms, and most in pools of their own greenish-blue blood, these, Kira suspected, were the life signs that the Euphrates could no longer read. One appeared to be female, the other two male, one of the latter with thinning hair. All three had been cut to pieces.
If these were members of the crew, they'd certainly paid for the act of dumping their lethal payload on Europa Nova.
Of Taran'atar, she saw no sign.
Then a huge figure stepped into view, walking pur-posefully toward her. The figure-whom Kira guessed was at least two and a half meters tall, though her worm's-eye view gave her a skewed perspective- wore an imposing uniform of dark metallic armor. Most of its head was covered by a helmet with ridges that began close together at the forehead and spread out and around to the back of the head. The only dis-plays of color beyond the blue-black of the armor were the alien's mottled brown face, the streak of white on either side of the helmet's middle ridge, and the streak of bright red under the leftmost ridge.
The alien stopped, looked down on Kira, and spoke one word in a deep, resonant voice that carried the promise of a painful death.
"Prey."
13
FARIUS PRIME
So this is it, Quark thought. We're going to die.
What galled him the most was that it was Gaila who engineered this. The beloved cousin to whom he had lent that latinum to get his arms business started-and this is how he repays me. He undermines a business deal just to take some misguided revenge on me. How could Gaila, of all people, forget the Sixth Rule of Acquisition? "Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity."
No, Gaila just sat there, smiling his "I won" smile as if he hadn't just ruined things for his own client. The Iconians would never get a better offer than this. The Orions were not likely to engender much confidence as a potential buyer after killing their own negotiator.
He probably had that same smile on his face after he had Quark's Treasure delivered to DS9. Gaila had always claimed that the malfunction that caused the ship to be transported over four hundred years into the past wasn't the result of sabotage, but Quark had never believed it.
One of the two burly Orions looked over at Tamra and smiled lasciviously. "Just so's you know, Quark- after I kill you, I'm takin' the dabo girl for myself."
Tamra smiled right back.
The Orion's face fell. This was not the vacuous fa-cial expression of a woman whose main purpose was to provide distracting eye-candy for the customers. This was closer to one of Gaila's smiles.
Then Tamra grabbed one of those idiotic tassels from her waist and threw it into the middle of the room.
Quark quickly closed his eyes and covered them with his hands. When the flare went off, a huge flash of light filled the room. Quark could see the glow even through his eyelids and hands.
A hand grabbed his left arm and yanked him out of his chair
.
He opened his eyes to see the room in chaos. The Iconians, the Orions, and Gaila were all blinking, try-ing to clear their vision and obviously failing miser-ably. For his part, Quark was being dragged toward the door.
The only person standing between the two of them and that door was Malic, crying, "Kill them! Kill them!"
"I'm blind! I'm blind!" one of the burly Orions screamed over Malic's voice. He had, Quark noticed, dropped his disruptor.
The other Orion, though, still had his disruptor, and took Malic's instructions to heart; he fired. Luckily for Quark, he was as blind as his panicky comrade: the shot went about a half a meter over Quark's head.
The blond Bajoran, still dragging Quark with one hand, clipped Malic with her other arm, knocking the Orion to the floor. In the same motion, she bent over and picked up the dropped disruptor.
Another shot flew over Quark's head, closer this time.
"Quark! You won't get away with this, cousin!" Gaila was, Quark noted, facing away from Quark, yelling at a bulkhead.
When they reached the corridor, Quark yanked his arm free. "What took you so long? I was starting to think you were going to wait until he actually pulled the trigger."
Lieutenant Ro Laren glowered at him from under her unnaturally colored hair. "You're welcome, Quark."
Deep spAce 9 (four days ago)
"I've got a little bit of a problem."
It hadn't been easy for Quark to come to the secu-rity office. He had, in fact, spent the last day staring at the door to Ro's office, trying to figure out what to do.
Normally, of course, he wouldn't even need an ex-cuse to go to the security office. After all, Ro was there, and that vision of Bajoran loveliness was more than enough reason for Quark to contrive a feeble ex-cuse to drop in.
But this was different.
It had seemed innocent enough when it began nearly two weeks ago. An Orion named Malic had entered the bar with a business proposal: he wanted Quark to nego-tiate a deal for the Orion Syndicate on his behalf. The terms had been pretty vague at first, as had the pay-ment-all Malic had said was that it would be "worth your while." It wasn't as if the syndicate in general didn't have money, and Malic in particular was obvi-ously a wealthy man, so Quark wasn't terribly con-cerned on that score. The syndicate had, in fact, turned down Quark's long-ago overtures for membership, so the fact that they were coming to him with a business proposition was enough to get Quark's lobes tingling.
Then came the kicker. Malic explained in very plain, simple terms why this was an offer Quark couldn't refuse. Then Malic departed, promising to re-turn "soon."
Now Quark was scared. He hated being scared-so much so that it rather irritated him how often he wound up feeling that emotion.
In the past, he'd have no one to turn to. His brother had never been the most useful person in a crisis- though even Quark had to admit that Rom occasion-ally had his moments, for an idiot-and Odo was as likely to toss him into a holding cell as help him out.
But there was a new constable in town, so to speak, and Quark felt confident that he'd be able to appeal to her better nature. As opposed, he thought, to Odo who, let's face it, doesn't have a better nature. Be-sides, when the renegade Jem'Hadar attacked the sta-tion a few weeks back, Quark had saved Ro's life. It's time I collected on that debt.
"A problem, huh?" Ro said with her toothy smile.
"This ought to be good." She stood at the rear wall monitors, looking over the current inhabitants of the holding cells. Quark saw the usual bunch of criminals, deadbeats, losers, ne'er-do-wells, and regular patrons of his bar in the screens. Ro turned off the surveil-lance and the screens went blank.
As she did, Quark started, "There's this Orion-"
"Malic." Ro sat back in her chair and touched the control that closed the door to the security office. "He came to you a few days ago to extort your co-operation in a business venture, and you're expect-ing him to return at any moment so you can get started."
Quark sighed. He hated when security people did that. They never understood the importance of not let-ting the person on the other side know that you know more than they think you know.
"Right. And that's my problem."
"Don't want to work for the Orions?"
"Don't want to work for this Orion." Quark finally sat down in the guest chair. "You see, I have this friend on Cardassia named Deru. He used to be a glinn in the military, and he was assigned to the sta-tion back when the Cardassians ran it. He retired about eight or nine years ago to go into private enter-prise. The two of us entered into a business deal about two months ago. We've been arranging to get supplies to people who need it in Cardassian territory."
"Very noble of you." Ro sounded almost sincere. "Or it would be if I didn't know you better than to think you're doing this out of the goodness of your heart."
"I am doing it out of the goodness of my heart!"
Quark said indignantly. "What is it about Bajorans that you think that doing a good deed and turning a profit are mutually exclusive?"
"So what's in it for you?"
"Land. See, we divert shipments of relief supplies to certain individuals in return for their land."
Ro's face distorted into a frown. "You kick people out of their homes?"
Quark rolled his eyes. "Don't be ridiculous. We're not doing this to anyone who can't afford it. No, we're getting supplies to the people with excess land. Nobody's being kicked out of their home. Besides, most of this property was damaged during the war. It'll only be useful again with a lot of work-which, I'm sure, some entrepreneuring buyer would be will-ing to invest in."
"And a Cardassian landowner who's starving to death wouldn't be willing to invest in it, but he might be willing to sell it to somebody like Deru, in order to stay alive," Ro said, showing a keen grasp of the eco-nomics.
"Exactly!" Quark said, grateful that she understood. "I knew you had the lobes for this sort of thing."
"Keep my ears out of this, Quark. So let me get this straight. A bunch of Cardassians, who used to be rich, now find themselves stuck with a ton of land, but no way to make use of it. They're also starving to death because the Cardassian economy is in a shambles, or maybe they're sick or injured from the devastation be-cause relief hasn't reached them yet. Along comes Quark-"
"Actually, it's my associate who approaches them."
"Along comes Deru," Ro said obligingly, "who
goes to these people, who are used to feeling like they belong to the greatest civilization hi the galaxy, and now can't even get a working replicator. And Deru tells them he can get them black-market food and sup-plies, courtesy of his anonymous, big-lobed acces-sory-"
"Hey!"
"-and all they have to do is give up all this extra land that they can't do anything with anyhow."
"You make it sound like I've committed a crime," Quark said.
Ro laughed. "If you didn't know you'd committed a crime, Quark, you wouldn't be here right now. Be-cause you know damn well that if Malic informed Starfleet or the Cardassian authorities about this, they'd rip your ears off."
"It isn't Starfleet or the Cardassians I'm worried about," Quark snapped. He looked over his shoulder as if he expected someone else to be listening, then turned back to Ro. "It's Garak."
Ro shrugged. "So?"
Quark threw up his hands. "You ever met Garak?"
Ro shook her head. "I know he's very involved in the rebuilding of Cardassia Prime. I also know him by reputation, and I honestly don't think we'd ever find your body."
"You see the problem."
"Should've thought of that before you got mixed up with Deru."
"How was I supposed to know that some old Orion would come along and blackmail me with it?"
"Isn't there a Rule of Acquisition about knowing your customers before they walk in the door?"
Quark rolled his eyes. "I come to you for help, and you quote the Hundred and Ninety-Fourth Rule at me. Some friend you are."
Ro leaned
forward and got serious. "What exactly does Malic want you to do?"
Sighing, Quark said, "He wants me to negotiate a purchase on behalf of the syndicate. I don't know what for."
"I've heard of worse deals," Ro observed. "Maybe you should just take it."
"You don't understand-this is the Orion Syndicate!"
"I know who they are, Quark. I went through Starfleet tactical training, remember? We spent a week just on the syndicate." Ro picked up a padd and started fiddling with it-constantly turning it ninety degrees with her hands without actually looking at it. "You're worried that once the Orions get what they want, they'll tell Garak anyway."
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