Star Trek: Enterprise - 016 - Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Yet Devna still had to serve out her punishment before she could earn her way back into the intelligence service. She had been properly submissive for all of it, retreating into a mental zone of self-abnegation, so that what was done to her body would have minimal impact on her mind or spirit. Yet she still welcomed those occasions when a customer showed some hint of treating her as a person rather than a tool for sexual release. So she had allowed herself some hope when told of her new assignment. The Sisters’ ally Jofirek had invited one of his own business associates to join Navaar’s alliance and had brought him to Orion to meet with Parrec-Sut, who was filling in for the Sisters’ chief overseer Harrad-Sar while the latter was offworld. His name was Charlemagne Hua, and he was a human who controlled the narcotics trade on many of Earth’s fringe colonies, worlds without the pervasive law and order of Earth and its Federation partners. Sut had assigned Devna to see to Hua’s needs for the duration of his stay. She had let herself hope that this human male would have some trace of the same kindness the agent had shown her.

  Sadly, this had not been the case. Charlemagne Hua was a boisterous drunkard, a tall, lean, flamboyantly but messily dressed man with a pencil-sketch mustache and long black hair in a ponytail that appeared perpetually on the verge of coming undone. He seemed cheerful and gregarious, but in an aggressive, imperious way that told Devna he would have little tolerance for any who defied his will. Apparently he had a fondness for young females, which was why the pale-skinned, daintily built Devna was assigned to him rather than one of her more curvaceous slave-sisters. He had pulled her onto his lap with pleasure and wasted no time tearing off her minimal adornments and pawing at her while he sat and drank with Parrec-Sut, Jofirek, and the Mazarite syndicate head Eldi Zankor.

  “This,” Hua said, laughing and hugging her painfully tight, “this is the stuff, my friends.”

  Jofirek laughed. “Didn’t I tell you?” he wheezed. “We could make a fortune if we got in on the slave franchising.”

  “Alas, most humans don’t look kindly on slavery. There are a few who would appreciate such an . . . exotic luxury item to possess for their very own, but keeping one would require a degree of, um, privacy that can be hard to achieve in a small colonial community. And really, what’s the point of owning one of these verdant vixens if you can’t parade her around, am I right?” The men laughed, and even Zankor joined in, for the Mazarite had two male slaves in attendance on her.

  “But consider this,” Hua went on. He grabbed Devna’s shoulders and turned her around on his lap, putting her on display. “Look at this. Feel this.” Jofirek took him up on his invitation, his gnarled hand reaching out to grope her leg. “No, that’s not what I mean—though you’re welcome.” Hua laughed. “Feel the aura she gives off. The overwhelming allure. The irres-irresistible heat. That’s power. We want to own Orions so we can tame that power, harness it to our will.” He smacked Devna’s rump. “But what would people want even more? What would get them to pay through the nose?”

  “Just tell us, you bag of wind,” Zankor said.

  “No, you tell me, my dear. I see the envy in your eyes when you look at creatures like this. You don’t just want to own this. You want to be this. The Orion physique is a fantasy made real. We purchase it because we want to be close to it, but what we really want is to have it for ourselves!”

  Devna braced herself. She could guess where this was going, and it probably wouldn’t go well.

  Indeed, Parrec-Sut rose from his seat, displacing two of Devna’s slave-sisters to do so, and took a step toward Hua. Sut was less burly than a lot of Orion males, tall but comparatively lean, and with a face that Devna found boyishly handsome. But she knew from long experience how intimidating he could be when he so chose. “What are you suggesting, human?” he asked, an ominous undertone in his smooth baritone.

  “Well, think about it,” Hua went on, oblivious to the raised tension. “Sex is all about hormones. Hormones give us our male and female traits. They regulate our sex drives and mediate our sexual intra—interactions. As pheromones, they promote attraction and arousal.” He laughed. “Come on, if there’s one thing Orions know about, it’s pheromones.

  “So this, this irresistible magic you have—at the risk of taking the poetry out of it—it’s all chemicals. Hormones can be replicated, synthesized. And most humanoids have basically the same bio, um, biochem-emistry—the same drugs and medicines affect them the same way.” The Saurian brandy he’d been guzzling was certainly starting to affect him more now. “Your hormones aren’t so different from human hormones or Vulcan hormones or horse hormones—horsemones—hah!—just . . . with a little something extra in the mix. They’re written in the same chemical language, and another humanoid body could process them just as well as yours could—otherwise they’d have no effect on other humanoids in the first place.

  “Really, Sut, I can’t believe this has never occurred to you Orions. You could package your sex hormones, market them as, as a drug. Imagine what people would pay for the chance to make themselves as manly as your men, as wom—well, feminine as your women. To be irresistible to the opposite sex, just by taking a pill!” He spread his arms and laughed, failing to recognize how much deeper a hole he was digging for himself.

  But Zankor took pity on him. “Stop, Hua, just stop. Don’t you see? That’s the last thing the Orions would want. If everyone could be that irresistible, their slaves would lose their unique value, and then where would their business be?”

  “Hmp.” Hua tilted his head, then tilted it again, as if trying to help the idea trickle down through the whorls of his brain until it reached some part with sufficiently low alcohol saturation to be able to process it. “I suppose I hadn’t considered that angle,” he conceded. “Yes, certainly it’s not something to be rushed into, not without considering the rami—uh, ramica—rafimications,” he finished with a firm nod. “But there are other reasons for people to enslave slaves, slaves—to own slaves. It’s worth thinking about, at least.”

  Parrec-Sut was rapidly losing patience. Devna hastened to grab the brandy that sat next to her on the bar and pour—no, on second thought, she just handed Hua the horn-shaped bottle, which the human accepted gladly in the middle of a sentence that trailed off once the bottle reached his lips. Soon enough he lost his train of thought, and soon after that he lost consciousness as well, sparing Devna from having to tend to his appetites any further for the night.

  Sut’s gaze went unfocused for a moment, suggesting that he was listening to a prompt in his earpiece from one of the Three Sisters. Naturally, Devna knew, they had been watching the exchange from concealment in order to assess Hua’s worth as a potential ally. Once he had received their instructions, he patted Devna’s shoulder. “Good move, Dev. You may have just saved this partnership—assuming he’s forgotten all about this conversation by the morning.”

  “I’ll make sure it stays forgotten, Master.” She smiled up at him, appreciating his sincere praise.

  He smiled back, then slapped her cheek just hard enough to serve as a reminder of his authority. “You’d better.”

  Under Parrec-Sut’s watchful eye, Devna summoned a junior male slave who helped her carry Hua to his bedchamber, where she undressed him and lay alongside him, on call for him if he should wake in the night and desire her services. But he was solidly unconscious, and she was left with plenty of time to think.

  What if Orion hormones could be made more widely available? What if there were no longer anything special about her—or about the elites who ruled the Syndicate and, by extension, the Orion race as a whole? What would happen to their authority if they were robbed of that monopoly on erotic power? If the playing field were leveled, might their control be broken, their subjects freed from domination?

  The thought intrigued her, until she began to consider it from a different angle. What would happen to the rest of the galaxy if other humanoids gained the power of irresistible seduction? Would not all humanoids then be just as ensl
aved as she was?

  Devna remembered what she had said to the Starfleet agent last year: that freedom was an illusion, that any perception of a free state of existence was just another dimension of entrapment. It seemed the principle still held.

  Still, every once in a while, it was nice to hope.

  Thamnos estate, Rigel IV

  “I hope the accommodations are to your liking, Garos.”

  Dular Garos looked around the suite that Retifel Thamnos had proudly shown off to him. It was indeed even more lush and impressive than the hotel suite in Kefvenek that he had recently vacated (lest the RTC or Starfleet trace certain compromising communications back there—and since he expected Rigel II to become a rather dangerous place in the near future). The technologies the suite offered, however, were less advanced than what he was accustomed to on his own ship, Rivgor—which only threw the pervasive air of decadent excess into sharper relief. As did the presence of several cowering serfs—all female and underdressed—whom Retifel had shown off as if they were part of the suite’s furnishings. Perhaps the Thamnos eschewed higher technology for it would render serfs redundant, leaving them fewer people to dominate and bully.

  Still, for all her willing complicity in her family’s abuses, Retifel was at least an agreeable conversationalist, so Garos put a smile on the Zami mask he still wore (albeit with some cosmetic alterations made since leaving Rigel II). “They will serve me quite well. I appreciate the gesture.”

  The ginger-wigged Zami smiled knowingly, taking a puff on her narcotic stick as she leered toward the servant females, misunderstanding his comment. “Oh, yes—they will submit to whatever services you may demand of them. However, ah, exotic those demands might be.” The females fidgeted, avoiding his eyes.

  Garos concealed his distaste for seeing females diminished in this way. At least Orion females, even the nominal slaves, had their pheromones to give them an advantage. “That will not be necessary, Retifel. I seek no companionship besides your own.”

  Her eyes widened, and he could see she was controlling her own reactions just as tightly. “Oh! Well. I’m very flattered, Dular, but—well, I am married, and . . .”

  He shook his head, laughing. “Please don’t misunderstand. I am irrevocably bonded myself, and incapable of sexual interest in anyone but my mate.”

  “Oh.” She looked quite relieved.

  He took a step closer. “What I mean is simply that I appreciate your company on an intellectual level. Living in exile is . . . lonely. I rarely have the opportunity to spend time with a female of intelligence and dignity.” Navaar may have possessed a certain cunning and strategic insight Garos could respect, but he found no dignity in the way she and her sisters carried on.

  Retifel studied him. “I am more genuinely flattered now. Here I had the feeling that you disapproved of the Families.”

  He replied with care. “I must live my life among alien cultures, dealing with those whose customs and practices differ from my own. I accept this. Which is why I appreciate admirable traits in my allies where I can find them.”

  She chuckled. “A smooth and practiced answer. You wear your masks well. I only hope the deceits you have prepared for Starfleet are as deft.”

  He respected Retifel enough to respond honestly on that point, at least. “I have learned from my past mistakes. Starfleet officers are skilled at penetrating deceptions, it is true. So the key is to employ enough deceptions to keep them busy—until it is too late for them to stop us.”

  U.S.S. Pioneer, orbiting Rigel VI

  According to the information Director Tenott and his staff had provided, the Ryneh Shipyard was one of the most disreputable shipbuilding and repair facilities in the Rigel Colonies, a place where smugglers, raiders, and pirates could get repairs with no questions asked or sell off stolen ships for parts. As such, Malcolm Reed had not expected it to look so impressive. The Coridanite-built facility occupied the cored-out center of one of Rigel VI’s smallest asteroidal moons, a wide cylindrical shaft running clear through the potato-shaped moonlet’s long axis from end to end. The near mouth, and presumably the far one as well, was ringed with shield generators, tractor emitters, and slips for small tugs and repair pods. Through the opening, Reed could see hundreds of docking berths arrayed all around the inner cylinder’s walls. The suspect ship that had come here from Rigel V had been tracked this far and had not left. Naturally there was no chance that Grev, Kirk, and the stolen archives were still aboard, if they ever had been in the first place; the ship had stopped at Colony Two en route and had plenty of opportunity to transfer them to a different ship. But at least a forensic scan of the ship’s interior and its database would reveal if they had been aboard and, if so, where they had disembarked.

  However, getting past the entryway force field was proving difficult. The shipyard’s operator—unexpectedly, a human colonist, a brown-complexioned man named Kuldip—had been putting forth whatever bureaucratic obstructions he could come up with to refuse them entry. But Pioneer had come prepared. En route, they had stopped at Colony One, the largest of the Neptune-class giant’s three terrestrial moons, to pick up Teixh Veurk, an official for the Colonial Port Authority. “We have the full power of the Trade Commission and the Port Authority behind this order,” the stocky Coridanite woman told Kuldip, her stern expression enhancing the natural frown created by the subtly inhuman bone structure between her eyebrows. “If you do not cooperate, I will have to review your operating license pending a full inspection of your facility.”

  As Veurk harangued him, Reed could see it sinking in for Kuldip that this was not the typical situation where the authorities would look the other way. For her part, Veurk seemed to relish the opportunity to take some real enforcement action for a change, and Kuldip evidently had good reason to fear her wrath. “Of course, of course,” he finally conceded with a stammer. “I, I simply did not understand the situation. Certainly, you are cleared to enter.”

  Suddenly Veurk became gracious and put on a wide, saccharine smile. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

  Pioneer was a larger ship than this facility normally handled, but Ensign Tallarico had no trouble navigating the Intrepid-class vessel through the asteroid’s entrance or the scaffolding and robotic arms that filled much of the interior. Regina Tallarico was a more experienced pilot than her rank would suggest. After her first ship, Discovery, had been shot out from under her at Berengaria VII in the first year of the Earth-Romulan War, she had been honorably discharged due to her injuries, and upon her recovery had enlisted as a pilot in the Alpha Centauri merchant marine. After the Federation had been founded, Tallarico had rejoined Starfleet with her old rank reinstated and with years of civilian experience under her belt.

  Unfortunately, that didn’t help them pick the ship they wanted out of the hundreds of small craft filling the asteroid’s berths. “We need you to show us where we can find the ship that entered your facility at, ah, thirty-one eighty local time,” Reed told Kuldip. “A type of vessel called a Grennex G-Seven.”

  “Ah, yes, the Grennex section.” Kuldip worked his console. “I am sending the coordinates to your helm now.”

  Tallarico turned to look over her shoulder at the captain, her blond ponytail swinging. “Got it, sir.”

  “Proceed.”

  Reed noticed that Veurk was frowning. “Something wrong?” he asked her.

  “Well, Captain . . . Grennex ships are a common make in the Colonies and beyond, and the G-Seven was a popular model for a number of years. I’m concerned that . . . oh. Well, see for yourself.”

  By now they had reached the coordinates, and the viewscreen revealed what Veurk had feared. The block of twenty-four berths before them currently contained some nineteen ships of various different configurations—but more than half of them were identical. Reed turned to Veurk. “Are those . . .”

  The Coridanite Rigelian nodded. “G-Sevens.”

  Reed faced Kuldip’s inset image on the viewer. “Mister Kuldip, you’re
going to have to give us a little more help than that.”

  “I do apologize, Captain. But I’m afraid our record-keeping system can be rather erratic. Unless you can give me the registration number of the ship in question . . .”

  “The ship didn’t broadcast its registry.”

  “Then I’m afraid I can’t help you. I suggest you try contacting the owners or previous renters of the various ships.”

  “If we knew how to find them—” Reed broke off. It was obvious enough that Kuldip was on the take; trying to reason with him was a wasted effort. “Never mind. We’ll manage it ourselves. Reed out.” He closed the channel, then turned to his right, addressing Valeria Williams at tactical. “Val, scan the ships. Look for any distinguishing features.”

  “Aye, sir.” The auburn-haired lieutenant spent some moments coordinating with Yasmin Achrati, the ensign filling in at sciences while Sangupta was away on Rigel III with Commander Mayweather. Finally, Williams shook her head. “I should’ve known, sir. None of the ships shows any significant differences from the others in its displacement, engine specifications, signs of recent usage, anything. In fact, I’d say they’re suspiciously identical.”

  “We do have the authority to search them all,” Veurk said. “The right ship won’t elude us forever.”