T’lana’s eyes widened and she immediately released him. She seemed impressed. The circle of ladies—who chorused “Oooooooh!”—also seemed impressed.
Most of them, anyway.
One of them—the female sitting in a distant box seat near the far wall—was not “Ooooooohing.” She was laughing. “Oh,” she chortled, “oh! That’s rich! You can’t convert what you don’t have. You already leveraged them as your buy-in to the game. You’re going to lose.”
Quark scowled. Was this a glitch in the program? This female character was intruding into his holofantasy. T’lana and the other tongo players had been perfectly willing to give him a pass on making the same wager twice—at least they had until this loudmouth had butted in! Where was this leading, anyway?
Quark strained his eyes, but the box seat was too far away to see who—or what—was mocking him. Yet he knew just what to do. Call the mysterious female’s bluff.
“There’s more than one way to win at tongo!” Quark declared. “I’ll wager”—he paused, thinking—“my Love Slave!”
The women of the wheel uttered a collective gasp. This was the riskiest move of all, one that could leave him with everything . . .
. . . or nothing.
They spun the wheel. Looking at T’lana’s face, Quark was surprised to see horror etched into those delicate features.
She cares, he thought. She actually cares for me. For Shmun, I mean. I always wondered . . .
The velocity of the spin increased, and this time he fell, landing on the platform with a loud ka-thump! He looked up to see T’lana standing over him, studying him dispassionately as the platform continued to move.
Around and around and around he went. As he passed each of the women at the edge of the table, he reached out, hoping for a helping hand. But at his touch, each one vanished in a shimmer of photons. Until only one woman remained, her face in shadow.
“Oh, Quarkie! How I’ve missed you,” she said.
He had heard that voice before. He remembered the tone of that voice. It made him angry . . . and happy . . . and confused, all at the same time. Then the room stopped spinning, and he saw her clearly, a lovely Ferengi female, her clothing so very different from the skimpy veils that had delicately shaded the others, her business suit nonconforming among the gauzes and lace. A woman’s stylish business suit—with pants, no less! Just like those worn after his idiot brother allowed his mother and the other traitorous members of her gender to ruin Ferenginar.
Quark sat up, feeling more than a little woozy. Had he been hallucinating? The room was mostly deserted now. T’lana remained, kneeling at his side, stroking his brow with one hand—and with the other, sneaking the last of the latinum slips from the tongo bowl into a handy pouch. “Oh, my poor Shmun,” she cooed.
Quark grabbed the hand that was filching the latinum. “You can’t have those,” he said peevishly. “This game isn’t over.”
T’lana’s succulent lips twisted into a sheepish smile. “I’ll make it up to you,” she whispered, leaning close enough to touch his ear with the tip of her warm, moist tongue.
Quark gasped and closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, T’lana was gone—and so, predictably, was the latinum.
She loves to play hard to get, he thought. Well, I’m up for a little hide-and-seek.
But as he slid off the platform, he nearly ran into the female Ferengi. And she was still wearing that distasteful business suit!
And to his surprise, he recognized her.
“Pel!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing in my program?”
15
“Hello, Quark,” Pel said, a fond smile playing about her lips. Her eyes—the deep, rich color of spring mud that he recalled—twinkled as she stared up at him. He’d forgotten how petite she was, yet shapely in all the right places—more noticeable now that she was no longer masquerading as a male waiter.
Damn. Quark felt a tug from somewhere deep inside his belly. He’d forgotten how cute she was without those ridiculous prosthetic lobes. He cleared his throat self-consciously and repeated, “Pel, what’re you doing in my program?”
She actually giggled—giggled!—and Quark, incensed, silently answered his own question, allowing the emotional “realization” to crash down upon him like a wall of counterfeit latinum bricks. “Oh, I knew it was too good to be true,” he moaned. “This is a big joke, just like I thought! What did I ever do to deserve such cruelty—”
Pel pressed a finger against his lips to silence him. It felt, Quark noted idly, remarkably like a real finger, not some replicated artificial body part. “Oh, Quark,” she said, “it’s not a joke. And I’m certainly not in Lust’s Latinum Lost! I’m just interacting with the program, the same as you are. Look, I’ll show you. Computer, end program.”
Instantly, the elaborate trappings of the program vanished, leaving only Quark and Pel in the middle of an inactive holosuite grid.
“You are here,” Quark murmured, bewildered. “But why are you here? I haven’t heard from you in years.”
“I thought that was the way you wanted it,” she replied, a touch of recrimination in her voice. “It’s not like you gave me any encouragement to keep in touch, or told me to stop by if I was in the neighborhood.” She lifted her chin defiantly. “Which I wasn’t anyway. I’ve been busy accumulating profit on my own, just like I said I would.”
Quark refused to feel guilty. “On your own, eh? Well, the last I heard, you were in some sort of ‘business relationship’ with Brunt.” His mouth twisted as he allowed the words to reflect all the innuendo he could muster. “I suppose he put you up to this.”
To his surprise, Pel chuckled in delight. “Oh, Quarkie! You kept tabs on my whereabouts! You do care, in your unrepentant chauvinistic way! You almost sound jealous!”
“Jealous?” Quark sputtered. “Me? Don’t be ridiculous. I just feel sorry for anyone involved with that gort hog! He’ll take you for every slip you manage to earn.”
She released a very unladylike snort. “You don’t have to tell me what a gort hog he is. I used him, that’s all, and I got out of that partnership as soon as I could. Took my share and left. Made some very lucrative investments that are still paying off—” She paused, realizing they’d gotten away from the subject at hand. “But I didn’t come here to talk about Brunt,” she said softly.
Quark eyed her warily. “What did you come here for?”
Her smile broadened. “Isn’t it obvious, Quarkie? I wanted to see your reaction to the holoprogram I produced.”
Quark’s jaw dropped. “You produced?” He gestured at the now blank walls of the room. “You produced Lust’s Latinum Lost?”
“Yes, of course. Do you think only a male can produce a holonovel program? I may not have lobes the size of yours, but you know that I’m smarter than most of the men on Ferenginar, and twice as smart as Ardon Broht. I had the brains to go into production and I accumulated the resources to finance my operation. All I had to do was find potentially profitable subject matter. And that’s where you were a big help.”
“Me?” Quark’s head was spinning. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. He recalled now that being around Pel previously had made him feel a little light-headed, even when she was in male drag. Before he knew that he was a she, he’d written it off to being dazzled by the precocious waiter’s business acumen. Later he realized that it was a natural hormonal response to an attractive, receptive Ferengi female. Now the feeling was coming back full force, particularly in the wake of viewing that erotic holoprogram. It was almost enough to knock him off his game.
Almost. But not quite.
“What do you mean I was a big help?” he asked, forcing himself to think rationally.
“Well, I remembered how fond you were of the original Vulcan Love Slave story and its silly sequels,” Pel said. “And that
’s what gave me the idea for my first holopublication. I put together a team to develop it. I needed a distributor who knew how to transport merchandise in and out of tricky situations—”
“Rionoj,” he grunted, shaking his head in disbelief at his own gullibility.
Pel nodded. “And then I found someone who not only was an excellent programmer but also was extremely familiar with the subject matter.”
“T’lana,” Quark muttered, not liking the way this was going.
“T’lana,” she confirmed. “And that saved me the bother of finding a new actress to serve as the Vulcan Love Slave holomatrix. Since the core audience for VLS already adores her, that’s built-in revenue. I got a package deal on her services: programming, acting, and writing, all for a very reasonable fee—and a small royalty. Nothing outrageous.”
“Great,” he grumbled. “That’s just great.” Something occurred to him. “Wait—T’lana told me she was just the co-writer.” His eyes widened in horror. “The other writer—it can’t be Rionoj. She can barely compose a comprehensible bill of lading. It—it’s you?”
He’d never heard anything so disgusting. A Ferengi female writing about . . . about . . . money! And sex! If there was one thing worse than a female making money and having sex whenever she pleased, it was writing about it!
Yet Pel looked insufferably pleased with herself. “Yep. I wrote most of the scenarios for Shmun’s . . . interests, shall we say? Because we did want it to appeal to the Ferengi consumers, and no one knows more about what a Ferengi male is interested in than a Ferengi fe-male!” Pel chortled. “T’lana wrote everything related to the Vulcan Love Slave’s behavior and motivation. After all, who would know more about Vulcan sensuality than a Vulcan?”
“Why would customers care about that?” Quark growled.
Pel gave Quark a scornful look. “I know you’re not stupid, Quark, so stop pretending you are. It’s not always about Shmun’s satisfaction, you know! This is almost the twenty-fifth century. Life is changing on Ferenginar! Even Gint understood that markets change with the times. And Broht and Forrester have been overlooking a huge market with their VLS programs.”
Quark attempted to follow her train of thought . . . and failed. “Vulcans?” he guessed.
“Fe-males!” Pel corrected, clearly resisting the urge to throttle him. “My partners and I are working on a whole line of holoprograms aimed at fe-males. Rionoj has been doing some preliminary marketing. She’s getting tremendous interest from holo facilities in the Dopterian and Kobheerian sectors.”
“Small potatoes,” scoffed Quark. “Good luck trying to sell them on Ferenginar!”
“Oh, we won’t need luck,” Pel retorted. “Rionoj has a meeting with Leeta next week!”
Quark opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind. He knew as well as Pel that a line of programs aimed at Ferenginar’s distaff populace would appeal to Leeta. And that Bajoran bimbo likely would convince her husband the nagus to buy into the concept.
Fine. Let Ferengi society crumble under Rom’s rule. Quark’s Bar would continue to hold out as the bastion of traditional Ferengi values. “Well, they won’t be in this arcade,” he said with a scowl.
Pel sighed. “I’d think twice about that if I were you, Quark. Good customers are as rare as latinum,” she said, quoting Rule Number Fifty-Seven. “Half your customers down in the bar are fe-males. Wouldn’t you like to profit from them up here as well?”
When he didn’t respond, Pel’s expression softened to one of compassion. She took his hand in hers. “Well, you can think about that for a while. In the meantime, may I assume that you’re still interested in Lust’s Latinum Lost?”
“You may,” he stated. “But not if you’re going to turn around and sell it to Broht as well. I need an edge—my business is dying here.”
Pel considered. “How about this? We’ll give you a six-month exclusive. No one but you will have the program during that time.”
“Not even the nagus.”
Pel nodded. “Not even the nagus.”
Quark thought about it. Six months was more than fair. “Okay. But what’s it going to cost me?”
Pel’s smile was very broad, her teeth very pointy. “Twenty-four bars.”
“Twenty-four! It was ten before!” He feigned outrage—but truthfully, he was quite relieved. It was less than he’d imagined. The program was going to make him a lot of latinum.
“Twenty-four,” she repeated, “plus two percent of the gate while it’s exclusively available at Quark’s. Plus the consulting fee you owe T’lana. Plus T’lana’s protection fee—for saving your butt from Broht. And from the Orions. Oh, and there’s the matter of Rionoj’s finder’s fee, for bringing it to your attention in the first place.”
Quark sputtered, but it was all for show. He knew that the bigger the smile, the sharper the knife—yet all Quark could see in Pel’s toothy grin was affection.
“Just tell me one thing. If you hadn’t screwed up that last chapter by interfering with the scripted story line, would Shmun have won that tongo game?”
“Oh, yes. Quite handily. And he’d have won the complete admiration of every lady in that grotto, particularly T’lana’s.”
Quark’s lobes tingled at the thought. “Just their . . . admiration?” he persisted.
Pel blushed prettily. “Oh, Quark, such a literalist. Use your imagination. Let’s just say that Shmun gets everything he’s hoping for.” She paused. Then, with a wicked gleam in her eye, she added, “Of course, that’s only one variation. If a fe-male plays the holoprogram, it all turns out very different.”
Quark narrowed his eyes. “Different how?”
Pel narrowed her eyes back at him. “Let’s just say Shmun gets everything he deserves. Although frankly, I think he comes to enjoy that nearly as much—”
“I don’t think I want to hear any more about that,” Quark said hastily. He didn’t like the idea of holoprograms that catered to female fantasies. Yet, in his heart, he knew Pel was right. His profits would go through the roof.
Resigned, he stepped forward to press his thumb firmly against her padd.
Pel stepped forward too, and pressed her nose against his. “I’m waiving my personal fee this time,” she cooed softly, caressing one of his lobes. “It’s worth it to look into your eyes again.”
Quark wasn’t entirely sure that he believed her, but for that one particular moment in time—and actually for several additional moments after that—he didn’t care whether it was true or not.
16
A fortnight passed.
A great deal can happen in a fortnight. An intergalactic war can start. A kingdom can fall. A fortune can be lost . . .
. . . or found.
At Quark’s Public House, Café, Gaming Emporium, Holosuite Arcade, and Ferengi Embassy, business was looking up. The clado, metaphorically at least, were most definitely fripping.
Bone weary after spending a long day battling the recalcitrant tachyon detector in a Heisenberg compensator, Nog wandered into the establishment, thinking he’d grab a quick bowl of chilled tube grubs before he hit the hay. To his surprise, every table in the café was occupied, with the overflow crowd gathered three deep around the bar.
He whistled appreciatively as he worked his way over to the far end of the bar, where Quark was punching numbers into a padd. “Wow, Uncle,” he said. “You weren’t kidding about that holosuite program!”
“Took a few days to get the word out, but the targeted marketing is starting to pay off,” Quark responded.
“Targeted marketing” was his uncle’s way of saying he’d bribed longtime customers to mention the program to their friends and acquaintances when they left the station. A tried-and-true Ferengi business technique.
“And Treir’s been talking it up on Bajor,” Quark added
.
“I’m surprised to see so many non-Ferengi in here,” Nog said, noting beings of pink, orange, blue, and green in the crowd. He did a double take. “And fe-males!” he gasped. “They’re all here for Vulcan Love Slave IV?”
“So it would seem,” Quark said with a shrug. “Pel told me she’d aimed for a broader audience than the previous producers. I dislike saying it, but maybe she knew what she was talking about.”
Nog smiled to himself. I never thought I’d see the day when he’d admit that! Maybe he’s finally starting to change with the times.
Suddenly Hetik appeared on the landing outside the holosuites. “Number Forty-Seven!” he called down to the main level of the bar. “Forty-Seven—you’re up!”
As Nog watched, a portly hew-mon made his way toward the stairs, his friends smacking him on the back in an apparent display of camaraderie. “Show her who’s boss, Slim!” shouted one. “Don’t tucker her out!” bellowed another. “I wanna show that sweet little Vulcan a thing or two when I get in there!”
Typical hew-mons, Nog thought, shaking his head. Valuing the carnal over the pecuniary aspects of the program.
Still, there were times when the carnal had its allure. And Nog had heard that Lust’s Latinum Lost was quite compelling. “I—uh—I was going to put my name on the waiting list,” he began tentatively, “but the way things look, I don’t think I’ll get in before I’m an old man!” He laughed self-consciously.
“Um-hmm,” murmured Quark, still absorbed in his padd.
“I don’t suppose there’s a way to get my name moved up a little higher on the list—?”
“Twelve slips,” Quark said without looking up. “You can pay Hetik.”
Nog’s jaw dropped. “Twelve slips! But I’m family!”
“Rule Number Six,” said Quark, firmly meeting his nephew’s disappointed gaze. “I don’t need to explain that, do I?”
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Lust's Latinum Lost (and Found) Page 8