by Dayton Ward
“Bijon,” Brunt snapped.
“They were ready,” Bijon said mildly, “so I thought we don’t want to keep them waiting—”
“Bijon, don’t you know what an appointment is?”
“I’ve never been to … Appointia.” He shrugged.
“Where is Pel?” one of the Kalani demanded. None of them were armed, but they flexed their hands threateningly, and Brunt suddenly saw that the four digits on each hand had extended a thick black claw as long as one of his own fingers.
“Pel is just setting up the display models for you to browse. She sent me to greet you while she finished.”
Wondering whether Bijon even had a share in the profits, of which he could be stripped, Brunt gritted his teeth. “Would you call Pel and ask her to come here, and tell her that—” He looked at the Kalani questioningly. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”
“I don’t know yours either, so we’re even.”
Brunt decided not to bother introducing himself. His former reputation as a Liquidator wouldn’t intimidate them, and he was in no mood to be nice to this one. “That a representative of the Kalani Republican People’s Democratic Front is waiting for her.” Brunt hurried out as Bijon made the call and ran all the way to the dining chamber on the deck above.
Gaila looked around from the head of the table as Brunt came in. “Ah, Brunt, you’re just in time to witness the signing of—” He halted, seeing Brunt’s harried expression. Brunt leaned in close. “They’re all here.”
“What?”
“The Loyalists are in my quarters, under the impression it’s a lounge, and the People’s Front are in the transporter room!”
“How?” Gaila hissed through his suddenly frozen smile.
“That half-Pakled factotum of yours!”
Gaila groaned. “I should have sent one of the Breen to supervise.”
“Who’d have thought operating the transporter was a two-man job?”
“Anyone who knew Bijon.” Gaila sighed. “Is Pel with them?”
“She better be, by now.”
Gaila nodded. “You entertain your group, and let the People’s Front browse the Cardassian products. While the KRPDF are doing that, I’ll escort the minister and her people off the ship. Then Pel can bring them here, and you can sell the Federation weapons to Commander Lotral. There’s no reason any of them should meet up on board.”
It sounded suicidal to Brunt, but he could do nothing else but nod.
Five minutes later, Pel was showing off Cardassian pistols and rifles to the KRPDF, and Brunt was in his suite, insisting on sharing a drink with Lotral. It stung to be so free with his supply. Brunt wasn’t incapable of generosity, but he much preferred it to be in the context of giving a little to recoup a greater return. He forced himself to remember that the sale of Federation phasers to the KDA was a greater return.
When Pel buzzed his communicator to let him know that she had taken the KRPDF contingent to the dining hall, Brunt magnanimously opened the door to his quarters and stepped out, followed by Lotral and her group.
Movement out of the corner of his right eye caught Brunt’s attention, and he tried to look in that direction without turning his head. Three of the minister’s aides were still in the corridor, not yet in the transporter room.
Brunt hastily leapt in front of the door to his quarters, and pointed down the corridor to the left. “Right along there. I mean, not right, straight. Straight along there to your left.” Miraculously the six reptilian soldiers all did as they were bid, without looking the other way along the corridor. Perhaps it was because being soldiers made them more receptive to commands, or maybe it was because the drinks in the impromptu lounge had made them relaxed and suggestible. Brunt hoped it was the latter, as this would make for an easier sale.
Just to be on the safe side, he looked into the demonstration room to be sure that there were none of Pel’s clients still inside. It was unoccupied, the racks and tables filled with Federation phasers of a design a few years old. Relieved, he escorted his charges inside.
Gaila felt a percentage of panic recede as soon as the minister and her entourage had returned to their planet. That was a recession he could appreciate, almost as much as the price they had agreed to pay for a shipment of disruptors. He hurried back to the dining hall to make sure that Pel was still there with the KRPDF group.
She had their leader’s thumb on her padd even as Gaila walked through the door. It was unfortunate that she was now legally allowed to keep some of the profit, but, at the price Gaila was charging, he could afford to indulge her.
He exchanged a few pleasantries with her and the clients, and then went back down to the hall in which Brunt was showing off phasers to Commander Lotral. “Commander!” he exclaimed volubly. “I’m Gaila, president and CEO of Gailtek. Has Brunt been showing you these prime weapons?”
“He has indeed. They are quite fit for our purpose.” And with those words, Gaila knew he had another sale. All three groups would receive their chosen quantity of the specified weapons, and none of them would ever see the weapons they had bought in the hands of any of the other factions. They would never know that they were one of three customers today, or that Gaila, Brunt, and the others had just made three times as much as they had paid.
He barely restrained himself from laughing outright. A short time later, when the last Kalani had returned to their planet, all the Ferengi laughed themselves silly. Lok, the leader of the Breen soldiers on board, and Voloczin, who came to investigate the sound, merely looked at each other.
Eight Months Ago
We’ll celebrate,” Gaila announced brightly one morning as they all took a delicious breakfast in the dining hall. “I’ve had reservations made on Risa for us to unwind after all these negotiations.” It had taken a couple of trips to deliver all the arms ordered to Kalanis Major, but they had completed the delivery with no problems. They had even made a few side deals on the way.
Brunt was happier than he had been in months; he had profit now, and that bought him contacts and information with former colleagues at the FCA. Or, at least, with former subordinates who were still in awe of him. Through them, he could keep his files updated as he planned his eventual triumphant return. Brunt didn’t think much of the idea of wasting their profits at Risa. Who knows where the money spent there actually ended up? Not among Ferengi, that was for sure, and that meant he’d never be able to charge it back someday. He said as much.
“Profits are there to be enjoyed,” Gaila said. “Besides, it’s the best place in the Alpha Quadrant to pick up tips for future ventures, isn’t it? All those people vacationing, drinking, letting themselves go wild … and letting their tongues slip! Their nondisclosure agreements forgotten.” He gave a conspiratorial grin. “Now do you feel the urge—”
“For a celebratory vacation? Now that you mention it, I suppose I do.”
“Good. We also need to invest our profits, and I have no intention of doing so through a former FCA Liquidator. No offense intended.”
“None taken. I don’t trust you either.”
“I don’t imagine any of us are stupid enough to trust any of the others to invest their shares for them,” Gaila said pointedly.
“I don’t mind,” Bijon said.
“I’ll see to yours,” Pel said quickly. Gaila and Brunt both glared at her. A female earning her own profit was bad enough, but tricking a man out of his . . .
“Where’s that Romulan ale?” Gaila asked. “Didn’t I have it opened to breathe?” He looked around the room.
Voloczin blinked his huge eye, slowly and deliberately. “I opened it half an hour ago,” he grated. “Where do you think it is!?” His skin flushed a pastel-blue shade, making Bijon laugh uproariously. It just made Brunt feel that the Golden Handshake’s dining room was colder than it really was.
Lok stomped up behind Gaila, rumbling a question. Gaila waved him away. “Of course you don’t have to accompany us. Remain on board and conduct securi
ty drills.”
A few days later, Brunt was sitting on a beach, bored out of his lobes. Water was brushing against sand in an irritatingly dry atmosphere. It was a nice enough view, if you liked that sort of thing, but it was all free. There was no charge he or anyone could make for it. Even the Risans themselves didn’t charge extra for lodgings in the area.
There were, however, one or two ways in which Brunt was enjoying himself in spite of his disapproval of the Risan way of doing things. He was moderately surprised to find that most females on the planet, of whatever species, went mostly unclothed, as females should.
On the one hand, this meant there were some strange and distressing types of alien flesh on show, but on the other hand, even Pel had changed into a skimpy two-piece affair resembling hew-mon undergarments. Not only did this suit her, but it suggested to Brunt that there was hope for her yet. She could still be persuaded to be like a proper Ferengi female, if the circumstances were right. Brunt himself still wore his hand-tailored suit and latinum around his neck.
“You’ve never been to Risa before?” he had asked her.
“I’ve heard of it, but never imagined I’d ever go there.”
“I’ve tried to avoid it myself,” Brunt agreed. Before he could say anything else, or even compliment her on her state of undress, a hew-mon bumped into him. “Watch where you’re going,” Brunt snapped.
“Hey,” the hew-mon said, “it’s okay. I just slipped is all. It’s the bloody sand, you know. It twists your feet under you when you try to turn around.” Brunt had noticed this himself.
“Another reason to hate Risa.”
“Nah,” the hew-mon said. “Just the beachfront properties, you know?” He shook his head, with its short copper fur glinting in the sunlight. “Me, I like the mountains better. Though they’re not as good as the ones on . . .” He frowned in thought. “That banking planet. You must know the one; you’re a Ferengi.”
Brunt looked sidelong at the hew-mon, Pel all but forgotten. “Banking planet?”
“There’s a three-planet system, mainly does corporate banking and investments, bonds, that kind of thing … But their mountains are fantastic. Best in the galaxy for climbing.”
“What sort of people are they?” Brunt asked, suddenly interested.
“Pacifists, same as here. No wars, no military. Just lots of banks and lots of mountains.”
Brunt grinned in what he hoped seemed like a friendly manner. “Tell me more . . .”
“A three-planet system?” Gaila echoed, later that night. Brunt had called to arrange to meet at a dabo club. It was noisy and smelly and a lot more fun than the beach. Gaila smiled, and nodded to himself. “It’s a sign.”
“A sign?” Brunt didn’t believe in supernatural aid.
“Three always was my lucky number.”
“They’re called the Urwyzden.” Brunt frowned, stroking the bar of gold-pressed latinum he wore around his neck. “I’ve never heard of that place described as a vacation paradise until today.”
“But you have heard of it?”
“I’ve seen FCA records, and communicated with some of the governmental officials on Urwyzden Alpha.”
“When you were a Liquidator for the FCA?”
“Exactly. I’ve had cause to deal with Ferengi who have invested their profits with the Urwyzden.”
“Invested?”
“It’s a banking center,” Brunt said. “Mainly for governments and interplanetary conglomerates. A lot of small single-planet or single-system governments deposit escrow with the Urwyzden, and use the place to broker deals and holdings. And sometimes, the most … lobeless of Ferengi do so as well.”
“Offworld banking?” Gaila said, disbelievingly. “There are Ferengi who trust aliens to hold their assets? Inconceivable!”
“Oh, but it happens,” Brunt went on, warming to his subject, and, as always when that happened, sounding personally affronted. “There are Ferengi out there who like nothing better than to rob the Nagal treasury of its cut of the banking charges.” Brunt’s hands subconsciously curled into claws, as if to wring the payments out of someone. “When a Ferengi collections agency charges a debtor”—he spat the word—“ten slips for the communication telling him that they’re charging him, one of those slips goes to the Nagus.”
“As is his right.”
“But when an alien bank does the same thing, there is no profit for the Ferengi. That’s precisely why Grand Nagus Lifax made it a crime for Ferengi to bank offworld.”
“Lifax? Ha! He was the biggest idiot the Nagal throne has ever had. A man who thought that harassing people and stopping them earning profit would make them better able to invest that profit with him.”
Brunt fixed Gaila with a warning look. “Biggest idiot until now,” he corrected him. “But it doesn’t matter. The law is the law, and we should be proud to uphold it.”
“Of course,” Gaila said. “That’s why I allow Pel to wear clothes and earn profit. The laws passed by our idiot-in-chief are, as you say, the law.” He broke off as a cheer of “Dabo!” erupted at the next table. The interruption seemed to have derailed Gaila’s train of thought. He frowned and said, “So, Urwyzden … Why are pacifists of interest to us?”
Brunt thought for a moment. Truth to tell, it was the opportunity to search their files for the identities of Ferengi who banked there illegally that he had first thought of. “Because they have something that others may want to steal, and no way to defend themselves from them.”
Gaila nodded slowly. “Interesting … The riskier the road, the greater the profit.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Brunt said, insincerely.
“Let’s hit the road, then.”
Six Months Ago
Urwyzden Alpha was a turquoise ornament set into the velvet heavens. Deep oceans formed a band around the equator, separating continents that reached up to the clouds with beautiful razor-edged mountains. Where the mountain slopes fell away toward the more extreme latitudes, the rich green of the forests blended into the crisp white of the polar caps.
As the Golden Handshake entered orbit, a white Federation ship was peeling away from the planet. Brunt couldn’t see all of the ship’s name or registry on the view shown on the main screen, but it ended with an E. “Sovereign class,” Pel said. “Wish I could take one of those for a spin. More transporter rooms, faster engines; think of the profit we could make with one of those. . . .”
Gaila looked out at the vast, sleek form as it rode proudly forward. It didn’t need to be streamlined like a creature built for racing in order to travel in a vacuum, but it was beautiful. “I wonder . . .”
“What?” Brunt asked.
“How much it would cost to commission the hew-mons to build me one of those as a private yacht,” Gaila said dreamily.
“Can’t cost more than that moon used to cost you to run.” Gaila looked at him piercingly, and Brunt smirked. “Did you imagine the FCA didn’t know exactly what its income and overheads were?” He could tell from Gaila’s conflicted expressions that he had thought exactly that. Which in turn meant he had set out to make that the case, which meant the FCA’s figures weren’t necessarily correct. Brunt made a mental note to find out how much Gaila’s moon really had cost to run. One never knew when some tidbit of fiscal information could open a door or two.
Someday, Brunt promised himself, his old office door would be opened to him again.
Gaila continued giving instructions. “Lok, scan for locations of military bases and defensive weapons emplacements.”
Lok snapped an affirmative and began working the sensor controls. “According to the latest open-source Federation database,” Pel advised, “Urwyzden has no armed forces.”
“No armed forces?” Gaila echoed. “Do you mean no military at all? Do you mean that hew-mon Brunt spoke to was actually correct?”
“That’s what the Federation have listed.”
“If I was the Urwyzden,” Brunt said darkly, “I’d hide my military fro
m the Federation. And anyone else.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe such an important and fiscally sensitive planet would have no protection at all.”
Lok straightened up from the sensor console and made a surprised-sounding comment. Gaila looked at him. “It sounds unbelievable, but Lok says there are no military installations detectable.”
“That just means we need new sensors,” Brunt scoffed. Or new bodyguards, he thought. He didn’t dare say that aloud, since, even though he didn’t understand anything Lok said, Lok clearly understood everyone else in the room.
The biggest cultural museum on Urwyzden Alpha was a banking museum. The second through seventh biggest museums were also museums of banking. The eighth biggest was a general cultural museum, which, unlike the banking museums, seemed aimed at an offworld audience rather than a native one. Brunt and Gaila had taken Brunt’s shuttle down to the central spaceport and parked as closely as they could to the sprawling pyramid of its terminal.
Much as both Ferengi would rather have visited the banking museums to compare Urwyzden development with that of Ferengi culture, they took a tour of the general history and culture exhibits.
The Urwyzden were small humanoids, perhaps the size of a prepubescent or teenaged Ferengi, and had slate-gray skin, gouged with wrinkles and studded with thick patches. There were, however, plenty of visitors to the planet, and so the Ferengi didn’t stand out that much from the hew-mons, Tellarites, and others who were visiting. The hew-mon Brunt had met on Risa had been right about the mountains, and it was clear that as many people came for them as came to do financial business.
The museum was a sprawling complex detailing Urwyzden evolution, and it was singularly lacking in displays of weapons and famous battles, either in the halls of preserved artifacts or the holosuite reconstructions of important events. Even the tour guide, who was so diminutive that she would have made Pel look as massive as Bijon, explained when asked that “Urwyzden has never had a war, in its entire history.”
“But, don’t conflicts lead to new inventions?” a hew-mon tourist asked.