by Ian Edginton
“What is this?” Hawkins asked.
Abramowitz smiled. “What we have here is the Ferengi version of a coming-of-age ritual. When Ferengi boys first go into business for themselves, they sell off their childhood possessions to give them a starting stake in business.”
The ambient noise in this area was even louder than it was in other commerce areas, so it suited Gomez just fine. Even taking into account the fact that Ferengi had superior eavesdropping abilities, she was pretty sure they could have a private conversation here.
“So what’s going on, Commander?” Corsi asked irritably.
As if on cue, a blaring alarm sounded out across the halls of the Debenture.
“Dammit,” Gomez muttered.
The Ferengi started shrieking and screaming, upturning stalls, shattering earthenware, ripping at drapes. Several turned from their wanton destruction and looked in the away team’s direction. They were grinning. It was beyond any lascivious leer Gomez had seen on the face of a Ferengi, which was saying a considerable amount.
“Let’s move, people,” Gomez said. “Corsi, take point.”
They moved almost as a single unit, Corsi in the lead as instructed, Gomez and Abramowitz in the middle, Hawkins taking up the rear. They turned the corner into a narrow alley, and watched as the rampaging mob shot past them. Gomez gave out a low gasp of relief, which was suddenly choked off by the figure that stepped from the shadows from among the detritus in the alley. It was one of the hooded Ferengi.
From the diminutive frame came a deep booming voice.
“Why are you not engaged in the Bacchanal? It is the Way of Milia.”
“What, you’re not calling it the Red Hour anymore?” Gomez asked.
“Huh?” Corsi asked.
Before Gomez could explain, the Ferengi raised the conduit pipe with the open end pointing at the away team.
“You are not of Milia. You must become.”
Both Corsi and Hawkins raised their weapons to fire—and nothing happened.
The Ferengi’s empty pipe welled up with energy that smoked and sparked, firing a charge at Hawkins.
“Agggh!”
As Hawkins slumped to the floor, Corsi leapt over his prone body, swinging her phaser rifle like a baseball bat, knocking down the hooded Ferengi.
Abramowitz crouched by Hawkins. The security guard had been in charge of the portable medikit. She took it from his prone form, opened the tricorder, and ran it over him.
“Okay, a medic I’m not, but his heart rate shouldn’t be accelerated, should it?”
“Get away from him, Carol, now!” Gomez called out.
Abramowitz got up just as Hawkins’s eyes snapped open, showing an almost glassy blankness. His lips pulled back into a rictus grin.
“Bacchanal!” he shrieked in a voice obviously not his own measured tones. He grabbed at the cultural specialist.
Before either Corsi or Gomez could react, the expression on Hawkins’s face turned to one of surprise and then he slumped to the side, unconscious but with eyes still wide.
They looked into the darkness of the alley behind Hawkins. Another Ferengi stood there, a block of gold-pressed latinum in his hands. He was panting heavily at the effort required to club Hawkins in the head with it.
Corsi was about to return the favor when Gomez stopped her. “No wait, look! He’s not like the others.”
The Ferengi gave her a withering look. “Oh, you think?”
He slumped against the wall. Gomez noticed his outfit: unlike the other Ferengi they had seen, he was positively scruffy, as though he’d been buried among all this detritus.
“Thank you,” she said. “We’re indebted to you.”
“And I’m already calculating the interest, you can be certain of that. We’ve got to get you off the streets while this madness goes on. You females are not safe.”
Corsi looked suspicious. “What does it profit you to help us?”
He shrugged. “This ship is full of Ferengi all acting … polite.” He practically sneered the word. “They’re completely failing to take advantage of each other. It’s a direct violation of the Eighteenth Rule.”
Corsi nodded. “‘A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all.’”
He looked at Corsi with surprise and respect on his face. “That’s right. Anyhow, when I saw you wandering around, I realized that you were an opportunity to resolve this sad, sick situation.”
“And looking for a way to gain advantage for yourself?”
He smiled. “Is that so bad?”
Corsi narrowed her gaze. “Ninth Rule: ‘Opportunity plus instinct equals profit.’ You certainly aren’t under this controlling intelligence.”
“No, I’m not. C’mon, we need to get out of here.” He removed the grille he was leaning against from the wall. “I have a safe area through here.”
Corsi looked to Gomez, who nodded. The first officer was grateful that they had found someone not under the influence of this force that hadn’t been heard of in almost a century. “Let’s go.”
“What about Hawkins?” Corsi asked.
Gomez sighed. “If we take him with us, it’ll make it all the easier for them to find us. Believe me, as part of the Way of Milia, he’ll be okay until we can sort all this out.”
They made the security guard as comfortable as possible among the discarded displays and goods in the alleyway, then crawled into the conduit. Corsi sealed the vent behind them as the Ferengi led them through the thin space.
The passageway led into a deep room, where the Ferengi had obviously been hiding for a few days. He gestured for them to sit on cushions he had scattered about the floor.
“Make yourselves as comfortable as you can,” the Ferengi said. “My name is Forg.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Forg,” Gomez said. “So when did DaiMon Phug acquire the Landru computer?”
Gold had Phug brought to his ready room. The DaiMon looked shifty, uncomfortable. He refused to meet Gold’s gaze.
“So you’re saying that the technology you purchased to administer your systems after you installed the cloak array was from a dubious source?”
Phug looked alarmed. “Dubious? Why, my brother had been married to his aunt’s sister—I could trust Caerph as if he were a member of my own family.” He paused. “Well, now you mention it …”
“My crew is in danger, Phug. I need to know what we’re dealing with here!” Gold snapped.
Phug looked concerned. “You mean you didn’t beam them back as soon as I told you to? They’re still there?”
“Whatever it is that’s trying to invade our system has managed to lock out transporters. We can’t hail them because they seem to have gone into some kind of shielded environment. So I need to know—exactly what is the situation over there?”
Phug shook his head. “This is bad, this is so bad.” He looked up at Gold. “The administration technology was somewhat … antiquated. I got it for a good price. Apparently, it had previously been used to operate systems on a small, low-tech world. I figured that for the needs of my ship’s cloak array it would be adequate.”
“So what went wrong?”
Phug started walking around the room, gesturing wildly. “Well, at first, nothing. Then, my engineers started noticing that it began to interface with the other systems, in ways that just didn’t make any sense. Before long, it had taken total control of the whole ship.
“Initially, that wasn’t too bad. It meant I could lay off about a dozen maintenance staff. And let me tell you, on a ship that size, the opportunities to maximize the margins are difficult to find. Then, I started getting reports of all these—incidents.”
“Violent incidents?” asked Gold.
“No, just the opposite. Everyone was being … pleasant to each other.” He shuddered at the word pleasant as though it were something base and deviant. “Before long, everyone on the station was acting in an orderly, caring way.” A further shudder, then he raised his hand, as though trying to push the ver
y thoughts away. “And then, he came. Milia.”
“I’m afraid the significance of that name escapes me, DaiMon,” Gold said dryly.
“He is our darkest legend, Captain. A Ferengi unlike any other. He preached such values as peace, love, and understanding. This—this freak spoke of sharing, of being of a benevolent society. Naturally he suffered a legendarily brutal execution, as did his heretic followers.” Phug sighed.
“When was this?” Gold asked.
“Several thousand years ago. Why?”
Gold was confused. “So how can he be ‘back’ then?”
The edge of fear was back in Phug’s voice. “I don’t know, Captain, but I just wish he’d go back to wherever it was he came from. He has changed some of our finest merchants into his ‘keepers of order.’ Any who speak out against Milia are absorbed into the whole. It started so gradually—then the whole ship was taken over, almost before I’d registered what was happening. I barely escaped with my sanity.”
“So why are you so worried about my crew?”
“Because, for some reason, this ‘peace and love’ cult sporadically erupts into violence and lust. They call it the Bacchanal. And your crewmembers are the only women on the station!”
“Bacchanal?” Gold repeated, wondering why a Ferengi would spontaneously erupt into behavior named for the Greek god of wine and celebration, Bacchus.
Then he remembered something from old Starfleet records—specifically the early days of the S.C.E. “Phug—this computer of yours. Does it have a name?”
* * *
In Forg’s hideaway, the away team were being told the same story—Gomez nodding as the details emerged, fitting the pattern she knew from the historical record.
“On Beta III about a hundred years ago, the crew of the Enterprise encountered a planet that had become stultified as a low-level agrarian society. The world computer, Landru, maintained this static model for several thousand years. Everyone happy, everything calm and settled.”
“Then what happened out there with ‘Bacchanal’? That hardly seems to fit,” asked Corsi, constantly checking all the exits to the room as she spoke. She was sure they’d be invaded by a horde of smiling Ferengi any minute….
Gomez shrugged. “There had to be a release of negative emotions, baser desires. For a period, these model citizens indulged in all kinds of lasciviousness, wanton destruction, random insanity. They called it ‘Red Hour.’ This happened every few months.”
Forg looked surprised. “This is the third Bacchanal in the past four weeks!”
Corsi gave him a withering glance. “Obviously, Ferengi have far more negative emotions than mere ‘hew-mons’.”
Abramowitz looked at Forg. “How come you escaped all this?”
Forg shrugged. “I was attacked by one of the Adjusters—a spice-master called Zin, who I’d had dealings with. I was trying to escape the ship when he cornered me. I thought that was it … but it seems the attack didn’t affect me as it did your dark-skinned friend. I was linked into the whole ‘Milia’ harmony briefly, then shook free. I took to hiding—”
There was a sound by one of the other access points in the room. Everyone looked around; Corsi raised her useless phaser rifle at the approaching figures. Damn, she thought, we’re completely cornered and my only backup is either unconscious or has woken up and is living out a Ferengi spree of wanton indulgence in an alleyway….
Forg then walked past her, waving for her to stand down. “Don’t worry—I know those footfalls.” He shouted ahead. “Hey! It’s okay, they’re here to help us!”
Two Ferengi cautiously walked into the storeroom, warily checking out the Starfleet people.
Forg introduced them. “These Ferengi are brothers, Ainoc and Aylai. Like me they seem to be immune to the Adjusters’ beams. We have to hide out here, while the madness of Bacchanal passes.”
Ainoc looked sheepish.
Forg stared at him. “What did you do?”
Ainoc grinned. “Well, as they were all wrecking their stalls and generally treating property in a vile and disrespectful manner, we carefully reallocated resources within our portfolio.”
“Much as I hate to interrupt the financial report,” Gomez said tightly, “we have a situation here, and you’re the only people who can help us. We have to find the computer core of this ship, and disable it.”
Aylai nodded emphatically. “That’s fine with us. If I never see Milia’s smiling face again….”
“This Milia,” Abramowitz said—and the three Ferengi shuddered at the name—“is some kind of, what—prophet in Ferengi history? I’ve never heard of him.”
“No reason you should, human,” Aylai said. “He was a deviant who proposed cooperation—exactly the type of society that is breaking out here like some kind of disease.”
Gomez nodded. “So when the system went online, it did as Landru had before: it looked for an ideal situation in your databanks and created a symbol of that ‘best’ time, taking on the personality and appearance of Milia himself.”
“It’s doing more than that,” Ainoc said. “Apparently we won’t be alone in this ‘joy.’ The Adjusters are taking the ship to Ferenginar—and they plan to ‘convert’ all the ships they meet along the way.”
Corsi cocked the useless rifle—an instinctive gesture, but one that made her feel better nonetheless. “So this is the situation in a nutshell: your DaiMon purchases a hundred-year-old computer to run his ship. Said computer proceeds to take over the ship, in the process re-creating a Ferengi heretic who preaches a commune mentality subservient to his computer-driven idea of ‘the Whole.’ Said prophet is now determined to convert the whole galaxy to this system of belief—probably starting with the da Vinci, if you’re right about them converting any ship they meet along the way. And he has a cloaked vessel that can strike anywhere in the Alpha Quadrant to do this.”
“I’d say that sums it up,” Gomez said grimly.
“And we’re here to seek an engineering solution to all this?”
There was a pause, then Gomez smiled. “Actually, I believe Captain Kirk’s solution on Beta III a hundred years ago was a classic engineering solution.”
“Which was?” asked Forg.
“Pull the plug.”
The face of Captain Montgomery Scott came into focus as the Starfleet logo faded on Captain Gold’s personal screen.
“You have a wee problem, David?”
“Afraid so, Scotty. Looks like we dug up another one of your old adventures. Remember Landru?”
Scott sighed. “Aye, I remember bein’ stuck on the Enterprise, while the bloody computer shot heat beams at us. If Captain Kirk hadna defeated Landru, our ship would have been sliced into charred strips.”
“Well, Landru just resurfaced—on a Ferengi ship.” Quickly, Gold filled Scotty in.
Shaking his head, Scott said, “Unbelievable, those Ferengi. Although I will admit that it’s odd that you of all people came across it, considerin’ that the S.C.E. as we know it today came about in the aftermath of that old mission to Beta III.”
“I remember,” Gold said. The team that had gone in to put Beta III back together after Landru’s deactivation was a prototype of the current model for the Starfleet Corps of Engineers.
Gold continued. “Unfortunately, I can’t get at our computer logs right now. It’s all Soloman can do to keep us from being taken over. So I need to know how Captain Kirk dealt with the computer back then.”
Scott smiled. “He reasoned with it. He an’ Mr. Spock convinced it that its very existence was contrary to its programming. The bampot machine then upped and destroyed itself.”
Gold raised an eyebrow at this. “They talked it to death?”
“Somethin’ like that, aye. It believed itself to be the embodiment of its creator, the original Landru. When it realized it had so violated his intentions in creating a peaceful society, almost out of shame it shut itself down. I don’t know if that’ll work here, though.”
* * *
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The Bacchanal had passed; the streets and avenues of the Debenture were littered with wreckage and detritus. Walking through the Boulevard of Nectar and Sustenance (a varied collection of restaurants and bars, the wares of which were spilled and spoiled across the broad avenues of the ship), the away team and their Ferengi companions nodded and acknowledged the now-calm followers of Milia.
Speaking as softly as he could, Forg said, “It won’t be long before Milia realizes what we’re doing. There are about two thousand Ferengi on this vessel. What do you think about those odds?”
“I think that we’ll deal with that if and when we have to.” Gomez tapped her combadge. “Gomez to da Vinci.”
The captain’s voice sounded full of relief. “Good to hear from you, finally, Gomez.”
“Good to be heard, Captain. We’ve been stuck in a shielded area. I think you should know what’s been happening here—”
“Phug was finally forthcoming about that. He told me all about Landru.”
“Tell Phug he has the lobes of a female!” commented Forg.
“Who’s with you?” asked Gold as Corsi shot Forg a look.
“We’ve found a few who aren’t followers of Milia, sir,” Gomez said. “They kept us safe when the Ferengi version of the Red Hour hit.”
“Good. Status?”
“We lost Hawkins to the Milians. One of the Ferengi knocked him unconscious. If we’re lucky he’ll stay out of it until we can resolve the situation. They also don’t intend to limit the return of Milia to just this ship.”
Gold replied, “I know. As it happens, we just heard from Ferenginar. Apparently this ‘Milia’ has told them he’s on the way—they’re none too happy about the prospect. We need to resolve this situation swiftly.”
“We’re on it, sir.”
* * *
In the Halls of Commerce on Ferenginar, on the Atrium of Announcements, the babble of voices had hit a higher pitch than had been heard since the legendary dark days of the Great Monetary Collapse.