STAR TREK: DS9 - Prophecy and Change

by Marco Palmieri, Editor

  Not that the changeling would ever admit it, of course. Indeed, mere moments after Quark passed the security office, Odo was at his side, affecting his usual superior sneer. “I’m glad you’re looking so cheerful lately, Quark.”

  “Oh, really?” Quark asked evenly, refusing to take the bait.

  “Yes. It means you’re overconfident. You’re so eager to get back in the game that you’re bound to make a mistake. And when you do, I’ll be there. Enjoy your freedom to do business while you can.”

  “Believe me, I will.” Quark smiled as he worked the elaborate lock that secured his bar—after shooing Morn out of the way, a ritual so routine he barely noticed it. “I’m enjoying everything today, Odo. It could be thloppering right here on the Promenade,” he said, using the Ferengi word for a particularly cold, hard, and miserable variety of rain, “and I’d be giggling like an apprentice and jumping in the puddles. So I’m not going to be bothered by that dark cloud that always hangs over you.”

  “Nothing bothers you?” Odo challenged as the doors slid open barely fast enough to let Morn plunge through. “Not even the fact that your brother Rom has given away his entire fortune, petty though it was, to please Leeta?”

  Oh, yes—without Quark’s levelheaded presence to keep him on track, that idiot had fallen under the sway of the hew-mons and that uppity Bajoran fiancée of his and thrown his life savings to the orphans. So what if it proved she didn’t want him for his money, like Rom’s first wife, Prinadora—he’d ended up just as penniless. But no—Quark shook it off. “Not even that, Odo. At least Rom is consistent in his idiocy, and that’s a comfort in its own way. Better a broke idiot for a brother than a cunning competitor.” Hmm, that’s good, Quark thought to himself. Could be a new Rule of Acquisition. I’ll have Moogie run it by the Nagus. ...

  “Just as well,” Odo scoffed. “It’s not as if your meager business skills could stand up to any real competition.”

  “Scoff away, Odo,” Quark said fondly as Morn, now settled in his stool, reached out to a glass that stood on the bar. “Nothing’s going to break my good mood today.”

  “How about a health inspection?” Odo countered, snatching the glass from Morn’s hand. “Don’t you bother to clean up before you close anymore?” Morn glared silently—the big Lurian rarely had much to say before his first drink, claiming the station’s air dried his throat.

  Quark fully registered the glass for the first time. “That wasn’t there last night, Odo.” He took the glass, felt the temperature, sniffed it. “This is a fresh drink.” He frowned. “Maparian ale ... with a hint of ... Pazafer?” he finished, the frown quickly fading.

  “Barkeep!” came a harsh cry from the shadows. “What kind of petaQ keeps a lady waiting for her drink?”

  Quark whirled, beaming. “Grilka!”

  The fearsome Klingon stepped forward, a broad grin belying her harsh tones. “That’s Lady Grilka to you, Ferengi. Of the House of Grilka.”

  Quark stepped forward and offered her the ale with a courtly bow. “My lady. All honor to your House.” He smirked. “Though I still think ‘House of Quark’ has a nobler sound to it.”

  Grilka laughed and pulled him against her. “It’s a good thing I like you, Quark, or you’d be long since dead.”

  “The way you show affection, I’m lucky to be alive,” Quark half-chuckled and half-gasped, before she pulled him into a savage kiss that proved his point. Odo and Morn exchanged a disgusted look that spoke volumes.

  When Grilka finally let him up for breath, Quark noticed Odo leaving the bar, shaking his head in disbelief. Could this day get any better? Quark wondered as he tried to regain his sense of balance and guide his Klingon lover to a table.

  “How did you get in here?” Quark asked. Just because he was deliriously happy didn’t mean he wasn’t concerned about a security breach. If Rom had broken his locking codes again ...

  “I wanted to surprise you, so I arranged it covertly with Commander Dax. She said she was ‘always happy to engineer a romantic gesture,’ and allowed me to beam in here from my transport vessel.” Quark was relieved that his codes were safe and that no one less skilled than Dax had pierced his beaming shields. Jadzia was one Starfleet officer who was always welcome to invade his privacy—well, so long as neither Grilka nor Worf were around to see it.

  “Well, it was a lovely surprise,” he told her, keeping those thoughts securely to himself. Certainly it was a nicer surprise than Grilka’s first visit to his bar, which had led to a shotgun wedding, a battle to the death, and other unpleasantness. Ironic that they hadn’t become lovers until well after their divorce. “Did you come all this way just to see me?”

  A Klingon noblewoman would not deign to shrug, but she tilted her head in a suitably classy and dignified equivalent. “The affairs of a mighty House weigh heavily at times. I felt I could use a ... pleasant distraction.”

  “Pleasant distractions are my stock in trade.” Quark leered. “I still have dozens of ... holoprograms for couples ... which we haven’t sampled together yet.”

  “Call me a traditionalist, but I prefer to stick with Kahless and Lukara. If you still wield a bat’leth as well as you did against Thopok when you wooed me,” she smiled seductively, “then we may share a passion as great as theirs.”

  Quark’s good mood faltered just a touch. “Well ... I may have let myself get a little out of practice.” Especially without Worf puppeteering his muscles through a telepresence relay like before. “Business keeps me busy, you know.”

  “Well, you were feeble at first, but caught on swiftly,” she reassured him, patting his hand. “With our love to fire you again, you will rally to the fight in no time.”

  “I-if you say so,” Quark chuckled nervously, and hastened to change the subject. “So ... these House affairs. Everything going well financially? Beneath your notice, of course, but ...”

  “Yes, my Ferengi, I know how such things amuse you.” Her smile faded. “In truth, things are not so well on that front. But such are the wages of battle,” she finished dismissively.

  “Oh, I’m sure. But if there’s any small way I could help keep the war machine running smoothly ...”

  “Here is a catalog of our recent losses,” Grilka interrupted, all business, whipping a padd from her belt. “Our enemy has struck hard, doing much damage to my estate. He is one you know, Quark: D’Ghor.”

  “D’Ghor?” Quark gasped. “But I thought he was in disgrace! The High Council did that ... shunning, back-turning thing when he tried to kill me.”

  “Fortunes changed during the recent war. Alliances shifted, factions rose and fell. Cousins of D’Ghor won honor on the Cardassian front, and he has borrowed some of their prestige for his own. And, I must confess, he fights honorably now, with open force rather than devious accounting tricks. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Quark said patiently.

  “He has allowed my men glorious deaths, as I have done for his, and I can honor him for that, at least. But his forces favor disruptors over blades.”

  “Is that honorable?”

  “It is ... somewhat more vulgar than good honest metal, but we have disrupters too, so it is fair. The main problem is that their aim could be better. My estate is full of holes, and many priceless antiques have been sent to join their former masters in Sto-Vo-Kor,” she smirked.

  Quark shook his head. “Barbaric—such a waste of good merchandise. Maybe you should keep your valuables in storage until this blows over. Substitute replicas in their place, or holograms.”

  “That would be deceitful.”

  “No, you. don’t have to lie, not if anyone asks. It’s just being cautious. Announcing your resources without exposing them, say.”

  Grilka nodded. “It is an interesting idea.” She smiled and stroked his lobe just the way he liked. “I look forward to hearing more ... later.”

  “Odo, you really have to get out more,” Quark said airily. “If the routine business dealings of a simple bartender are
of such consuming interest to you, then you desperately need to take a good, long look at your life and what it’s missing.” He smiled. “And then we can discuss where I can get it for you and how much you’ll pay for it.”

  Odo almost accused him of offering a bribe, but he realized it was nothing of the sort—just a Ferengi’s reflexive response to every situation as a business opportunity. Had it been a bribe, Odo knew, it would’ve been delivered in a far oilier tone. Besides, even Quark knew better than to try a bribe on him—even in the middle of the lovestruck haze he’d been drifting around in for the past few days. Odo couldn’t begin to understand what a Klingon noblewoman could see in a degenerate like Quark—honestly, it stretched Odo’s faith that there was justice in the cosmos when this ratlike reprobate could attract so many respectable females while an upstanding lawman ... well, never mind. It wouldn’t have bothered him so much if Quark’s recreations with Grilka had managed to distract the Ferengi from his extralegal schemes. But if anything, she’d energized him, heightened his focus and his confidence—and his caution. The mistake Odo had expected him to make hadn’t materialized yet. But maybe, if he kept the pressure up, Odo could throw Quark off his balance. Or at least wear him down.

  So he peered at Quark with his most intimidating peer. Odo had few equals when it came to peers. “All I’m missing, Quark, is proof. If I find out you’re selling espionage technology to a hostile power ...”

  “Really, Constable! Such paranoia is unbecoming. The Reletek are a peaceful, neutral people. They invented the transphasic sensor array as a scientific tool, nothing more.” He segued smoothly into sales-pitch mode. “It’s for scanning phenomena that exist out of phase with normal space and time—things undetectable by normal means. Nothing more than ghosts to us. What could be the harm in that?”

  Odo knew he was basically telling the truth; the Reletek were a small, herbivorous, molelike people who had never done much harm to anyone and barely attracted any notice. Their one noteworthy feature was the genius for sensory technology that they’d developed to compensate for their own limited senses. But Odo was more concerned with how others might abuse the fruits of that genius. “Dax tells me that transphasic scans could be used to bypass sensor-jamming fields, or to listen in on encrypted subspace transmissions.”

  “They can also be used to penetrate certain kinds of cloak, or to detect interphasic beings like those sneaky Devidians. In fact, they could be a positive boon to station security. You shouldn’t be browbeating me, Odo, you should be making me an offer.”

  “And this no doubt explains all the fine, security-minded scientists on your client list. The warlords of Alrakis ... the Nachri insurgents ... the Tzenkethi. ...”

  “None of whom are currently at war with Bajor, the Federation, or their allies,” Quark hastened to point out.

  “And I’m sure the Lady Grilka wouldn’t be upset to learn that a certain House of D’Ghor is also in business with the Reletek?”

  To Odo’s satisfaction, that finally got a reaction out of Quark. “You haven’t told her, have you?” he asked furtively.

  “Any reason why I shouldn’t?”

  Quark recovered his nonchalant air, though it wasn’t as pristine as before. “I just ... don’t want to bother her with irrelevancies. I mean, it’s not as if I’m the one who brokered that deal. It was made weeks ago, before I even went into business with the Reletek. And from what I gather, it was for a general sensor upgrade package. D’Ghor isn’t really into anything as subtle as espionage, from what I hear.”

  Odo had to concede privately that Quark was right—other than Grilka, there was nothing to connect the Klingon to Quark. He’d vaguely wondered if Quark might have arranged the attack on Grilka’s estate in order to create a financial crisis that would bring her here to consult with him. But it had only been a month since Quark’s failed flirtation with arms dealing, which had demonstrated that he had some trace of conscience within that misshapen head of his. He wouldn’t directly engineer dozens of deaths merely to satisfy his carnal pleasures. Odo had been secretly relieved when Quark had chosen not to follow his cousin Gaila across that line—though only, he rationalized to himself, because it verified his assessment of Quark as more a nuisance than a genuine menace. He was tempted to pursue this further just to make Quark squirm, but it would be pointless and prurient.

  Still, the smug look on Quark’s face irked him. “Face it, Odo,” the Ferengi said, “you’ve got nothing. You’re wasting your time harassing me when you should be out tracking down some real lawbreakers.”

  “Quark, whenever I’m around you I can practically hear the laws breaking. You’ve never seen a law you haven’t tried to break.”

  “You think so, do you?” Quark leaned forward intently. “Between the two of us, who follows the rules more, hmm? Me, that’s who.” Odo scoffed reflexively, but Quark didn’t let him go further. The changeling realized their banter had given way to something more serious. “Why do you think Grilka likes me? Because she sees that I’m a man of honor. I live by a clear ethical code, the Rules of Acquisition. Maybe it’s not your code, or the Federation’s, but it’s the code of my people, and I work hard to live by its dictates.

  “You, on the other hand—you break the rules all the time. You broke the Cardassians’ rules, to protect people they would’ve killed. You break Starfleet’s rules whenever it suits you, if they get in the way of your precious ‘justice.’ And what about that shapeshifting? It gives you an unfair advantage. It’s cheating. But that never bothers you, does it?” Quark shook his head. “You don’t even obey the normal laws of physics! An eighty-kilo man one moment, a hundred-gram goblet the next. How do you even do that?” Odo sometimes wondered that himself. Dax’s theories about folding his mass into subspace sounded reasonable, but proof had been elusive.

  “And on top of all that,” Quark went on, “you’re in love with a terrorist! The ultimate criminal!”

  “Be quiet!” Odo hissed, trying to make it sound contemptuous rather than furtive, and failing miserably.

  “Ha!” Quark exclaimed, pointing a finger. “And you call me dishonest. How much longer are you going to lie to Kira about your feelings?”

  “I’ve never lied to her! I’ve merely ... been circumspect.”

  “ ‘Evasive’ is more like it.”

  “It wouldn’t be appropriate,” Odo said, emphasizing every word. “Kira’s happy with First Minister Shakaar. I’ve ... learned to move on.” He was trying to persuade himself as much as Quark, he knew. Kira had been going on so much lately about her plans to visit Shakaar on Bajor next week, to take him to the Glyrhond Falls, the Kenda Shrine, and other romantic locales. It was the most cheerful she’d been since the recent death of her friend Tekeny Ghemor. Her bond with Shakaar was good for her, something stable and secure, and the last thing Odo wanted was to disrupt her happiness with his regrets.

  “If you say so.” The frank sarcasm in Quark’s tone galled him—especially because it was warranted. “But would she have ended up with him if you’d been honest with her when you had the chance?”

  “You’re one to talk about honesty in relationships,” Odo shot back, unwilling to confront the question. “If you’re so honest, why don’t you tell Grilka how you really won her over? What does Klingon honor say about letting someone else do your fighting for you?”

  “Hey—Worf may have been doing the moves, but I was the one whose skin was on the line!”

  “Do you think she’d appreciate the distinction? Why don’t we ask her?”

  Quark seemed genuinely panicked now—yet somehow that didn’t satisfy Odo as much as he would’ve expected. Perhaps the sense of potential loss in his eyes looked too familiar. “Odo, you’re kidding, right? There’s no need to do anything crazy here. ...”

  “I don’t need to, Quark. You can’t keep making excuses forever—sooner or later you’ll have to spar with Grilka. And with Worf and Dax off on the Rotarran, you’ll have to rely on your own, hunh, ‘skil
ls.’ I’d recommend wearing a combadge so you can be beamed directly to sickbay.”

  Somehow his taunt seemed to backfire—Quark was growing more smug. “Don’t buy me a condolence card yet, Odo. When the time comes, I intend to be ready.” He sidled closer, conspiratorially. “I’ve been practicing every day in the holosuite. You know, the bat’leth’s not that hard to handle, once you get the hang of it.”

  Odo scoffed again. “You? The man who objects to exercise because it makes you sweat?”

  “Can you believe it?” Quark chuckled. “The things we do for love, as the hew-mons say. But I tell you, Odo,” he sighed, “that is one female who’s worth it all. Ninety-Eighth Rule, my friend: ‘Every man has his price.’ I guess she’s mine. She makes me feel ... honorable.” He shook his head. “Who knew that could be a good thing?”

  Odo realized he’d run out of comebacks. This wasn’t some fleeting exercise in lust—Quark really cared for Grilka, and that threw Odo for a loop. Quark may have used deceit to win Grilka’s affections, but at least he’d been forthright about his feelings. And that was more than the chastened changeling could say.

  “This is odd,” Quark murmured as he lay next to Grilka in his quarters, studying the account of her estate’s losses.

  “Hmm, what’s that?” she said distractedly, while making a casual yet somewhat effective effort to distract him in turn.

  “It’s uncanny how many of the things D’Ghor’s forces have destroyed were valuable. I mean, this is just collateral damage, right? Random destruction?”

  “Correct.”

  “Then either you have the luck of Slug the Loser, or ...” He shook his head. “It just doesn’t make sense. Why would D’Ghor go out of his way to destroy your valuables? I thought your property was what he most wanted for himself.”