But the Hirogen hunt-leader didn’t see anything unusual about them. In fact, he perceived the drone and her Vulcan companion as two members of the same prey-species, indistinguishable from one another except for the difference in their sexes.
Nor did he realize that one of his brother hunters had already taken a Borg trophy decades earlier.
Driven by their cultural mores, the Hirogen see first contact only as an opportunity for capturing unique prey and displaying horrific trophies. There is no attempt at communication, no room for negotiation, making them, in many ways, very similar to the Borg.
In my mind’s eye, I see a Borg scout vessel—a dark cube one-hundredth the size of a regular Borg ship. The scout is sparking, venting clouds of white-hot plasma, enduring electromagnetic lightnings that race across the surface of its hull like parasites.
The scout is dying.
It was damaged initially in some incident of which the relay network is unaware. Even then, the cube might have limped across space to rejoin its mothership. However, it has the bad fortune to run across the sensor grid of a Hirogen hunt-leader.
I picture the hunter ship closing with the Borg vessel at the edge of a solar system and considering his short-range sensor data. The scout won’t put up much of a fight in its present condition, it seems to the hunt-leader. However, it contains beings of a sort he’s never seen before. Eventually, the uniqueness of the relics he hopes to obtain outweighs his contempt for his prey’s defensive abilities.
Bringing his particle weapons to bear, he disables the few systems that still function on the scout. Then he attempts to transport the crew of five onto his vessel.
Unfortunately for the hunter as well as his intended prey, there’s too much energy running rampant on the Borg ship for the Hirogen to get a secure lock on them. What’s more, the scout is headed for a collision with one of the system’s outermost worlds, and the hunter is reluctant to deploy a tractor beam for fear his prey will explode in his face.
So he does what any experienced hunter would do—he takes a reasonable chance. He deploys additional power to his shields and remains close enough to try to obtain a transporter lock.
As the Borg vessel pierces the planet’s outer atmosphere, the Hirogen finally succeeds in his efforts. However, his success is only momentary, because the scout chooses that moment to erupt in a paroxysm of antimatter fury. The Hirogen ship is unharmed, though the transport has been interrupted and the hunt along with it.
But according to the account the hunter will later send through the relay network, the five Borg were held in his pattern buffer long enough to protect them from the blast. That means they might still be alive somewhere on the planet’s surface.
Arming himself and a handful of his subordinates, the hunter daubs his headgear with white paint and beams down after his prey. When he arrives, he finds himself standing in the midst of fiery devastation—the result of the scout ship’s rather impressive explosion.
Fortunately for the hunters, their body armor and rebreathing apparatuses protect them from the fires and the radioactive fallout, and their immune systems nullify what their armor can’t keep out. At their leader’s command, they fan out and search for the scout’s occupants.
After several hours, they find two of the Borg. There’s not much left of them besides charred bones and metal components, but it’s enough for the hunt-leader to hang on his bulkhead.
What’s more, he’s discovered a bonus—a pack of the planet’s native sentients, who were apparently driven from their homes by the blast. The hunt-leader picks out two to bring back to his vessel for evisceration. He orders the rest of them killed out of hand, an assignment that his subordinates are quick to carry out.
Then the Hirogen and their quarry beam back to their vessel, where the hunt-leader intends to gut his living prizes. But first, he asks them about their people and their culture. They say their civilization is a peaceful one, devoted to art and philosophy.
They call themselves Sakari.
It took me more than a year to uncover the truth … to see that, contrary to the evidence unearthed by Janeway and Chakotay, the Borg hadn’t come to the Sakari’s homeworld to assimilate them. A scout ship had crashed there because the Hirogen were, in effect, trying to assimilate the Borg.
In fact, if anyone could be blamed for the destruction of Sakari civilization, it was the Hirogen. And the only reason they hunted the Borg was because the Borg hunted them more than a hundred millennia earlier.
Ironies upon ironies.
And with the relay system no longer functioning for a reason I can’t fathom, neither the Borg nor the Hirogen nor the Sakari are likely to learn how intertwined their destinies have been.
That knowledge has been the sole province of a single humble exosociologist in a research facility in Cleveland. But now I can share it with the rest of the Federation.
And maybe with a little luck, I’ll be able to share it with the crew of Voyager someday as well.
Left behind, this drone inspired terror in an entire society, something that the inhabitants of Earth and the survivors of Wolf 359 can well understand.
FEREGINAR
A DRY DAY
This is one of the oldest houses in the residential estates. The original builder created this unusual three story house because of a feud with the Proprietor of the Flood Control Gates. Refusing to pay a “waterfront surcharge,” the additional stories were added because the first floor was usually underwater. You can still see the high water mark and the old “docking door” on the second floor.
The sky is an angry purple womb, giving birth to torrent after cold, heavy torrent, turning the low buildings that surround us into a series of vague, gray shapes. Pulling my woven-fiber hood down more closely about my face, I try to escape the weight of the rain, if only for a moment. But there’s no escape, no let up, no respite.
Crowds toss us like a tumultuous sea, everyone around us as wet and uncomfortable as we are. Small, shifty eyes flash in annoyance at us from beneath every kind of headgear imaginable-none of which proves very effectual against the relentless downpour.
My companion says something, but I can’t understand him. The rain is drumming too loud on my skull. “I beg your pardon?” I yell.
He grabs me by the sleeve of my slick-jacket and pulls me down to his level. Then he bellows in my ear. “Los Angeles!”
“Los Angeles?” I reply wonderingly.
My companion’s expression becomes one of disgust and he shakes his hooded head. “No, no, no … I say it’s scandalous!”
A sheet of rain is driven into my already raw, stinging face. Wiping my eyes, I squint at him. “What is?” I ask.
“Seize her warms,” my companion tells me.
“Seize her … ?” I echo helplessly.
Again, he screws up his face in frustration. “These reforms!” he yells at the top of his lungs.
I nod to show that I understand what he’s said. I expect that he’ll let go of my sleeve then, but he doesn’t. Instead, he pulls me in the direction of a hovercar that’s sliding to a halt just a few meters away.
Several other Ferengi rush after it as well, but my host and I get there first. I pay the driver an advance by slipping strips of latinum into a slot in the side of the vehicle.
Through a window, I can see the driver—who’s nice and dry inside—counting and recounting the strips. Only after he’s satisfied that he’s received the proper sum does he slide open the door.
We pile in quickly, first my companion and then myself. A moment later, the door to the hovercar slides closed again, shutting out the hiss and bluster of the weather.
I wonder if I’ve lost my hearing. It’s insanely quiet in here after the numbing din of the deluge outside. But not for long.
“Retirement benefits for the aged,” says my host, a fellow named Quark. Pulling back his hood, he flicks a drop from one of his protuberant frontal lobes. “Wage subsidies for the poor. Health care for everyo
ne.” He looks as if he’s swallowed something that went rancid weeks earlier. “I tell you, hew-mon, this is a dark time in the history of Ferenginar.”
I look out the window in time to witness the arrival of another hovercar. Ferengi swarm around this one, too, elbowing and kicking one another to get to the slot where the latinum is inserted.
Rain sizzles around the conflict like a nest of hungry vipers. For a moment, the entire scene is whitewashed by a bolt of jagged lightning, followed closely by a whip-crack of thunder that threatens to make my heart stop. Then the crowd is folded into the gloom of the downpour again.
A dark time indeed, I tell myself.
On Earth, this would have been labeled a thousand-year storm, the kind of meteorological oddity one could tell one’s grandchildren about. On Ferenginar, where the natives have 178 different words for rain and not a single word for “crisp,” it’s an everyday occurrence.
Of course, the rain is something the Ferengi have learned to cope with. Social reforms are a different story.
The capital city of the Ferengi Alliance. It was here the legend of the Ferengi eating their business partners started. A Triskelion refused to pay the toll on one of the bridges. He set across the low-lying swamp and was sucked into the muck and smothered. The toll keeper’s report was garbled by a substandard universal translator into, “I ate him.”
Ferenginar has been the galaxy’s undisputed champion of capitalistic commerce. The reasons for this almost fanatical devotion are lost in the mists of ancient history, but that doesn’t make it any less real.
Shortly after the Federation encountered the Ferengi Alliance in 2364, an Andorian diplomat was assigned the task of formal first contact. On his return to Federation space, he was asked what the Ferengi were like. He said, “It would be easier to separate a Vulcan from his logic than to pry a single slip of latinum from the hand of a dying Ferengi.”
Subsequent ambassadors to Ferenginar have called their predecessors assessment an understatement. They’ve found that Ferengi value the accumulation of profit above everything … even their own lives.
The contract is the cornerstone of Ferengi civilization. Any Ferengi found guilty of violating a bona fide agreement is liable to have his trading license revoked, in which case he becomes incapable of making profit.
And as the 18th Rule of Acquisition clearly states, “A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all.”
Quark, son of Keldar. He knows each and every one of the 285 Rules of Acquisition by heart. He spent the majority of his life earning profit off his homeworld, yet longs for the Ferenginar of his youth. He keeps reiterating that the changes are too much like “root beer.”
Quark is silent, caught up in some private thought. It’s just as well. After the drone of thunder and the drumming of the downpour, I just want to sit quietly for a moment.
Through the rain that sheets and splatters on our hover windows, I catch glimpses of immense, sky-prodding gray towers with spired tops and large-eared gargoyles spouting cascades of rainwater at every level.
The tallest edifice of all is the Tower of Commerce, a dark, articulated hive whose highest floors are lost in sooty billows of cloud. In addition to the largest and most striking collection of gargoyles around, the Tower is adorned with stately black columns, elaborate scrollwork, and dramatic friezes of pivotal moments in Ferengi mercantile history.
Its fortieth floor is home to the Ferengi Commerce Authority (FCA), whose name alone strikes terror into the hearts of Ferengi everywhere—and with good reason. The FCA monitors the business dealings of Ferengi on Ferenginar and elsewhere. Anyone believed to have violated a trade law is issued an ominous black scroll called a writ of accountability, which demands a detailed financial statement from the suspected wrongdoer.
If a Ferengi is found guilty of the charges, he can be fined or even, in extreme cases, barred from engaging in commerce with other Ferengi. And remember, “A Ferengi without profit …” Well, you know the rest.
At the Tower’s base is the Sacred Marketplace, a vast, sprawling plaza full of shadowy, domed roofs, where traders of every conceivable kind of commodity haggle over the smallest nuance of even the most insignificant transaction.
Beyond the Tower and the Marketplace, the buildings begin to thin out and to change in character. The massive, almost sinister-looking office towers give way to smaller, more ornate structures with illuminated sculpture gardens and private tango parlors—the estates of the wealthy, who have made their profits trading with off-world species.
I’ve heard that every one of these interstellar trading barons has a statuette of DaiMon Greko in his foyer. And well he should, considering it was Greko who opened up the spaceways to an eager Ferenginar.
Grand Nagus Oblatis is credited with the expression, “Get dry, young lobling!” By encouraging Ferengi to seek profit off-world he expanded Ferengi influence across the galaxy. After an hour on Ferenginar, most humanoid visitors agree: the pursuit of dryness, anything dry, is preferable to an existence in the constant rain.
Greko, son of Garjak, didn’t show much promise as a child. He was boisterous, aggressive, blunt . . . not at all like his friends, who were miniature models of the conniving and calculating adults they would eventually grow up to be.
When the time came for Greko to leave his father’s home, he didn’t auction off his boyhood treasures to raise capital as was expected of a young Ferengi. Instead, he went to work on a Ridorian merchant ship, desiring above all else to see the wonders of the galaxy.
Or so it seemed.
In actuality, Greko was just as grasping and devious as any other Ferengi. It was just that he was a lot more ambitious. Instead of aiming to enrich only himself, he aimed to enrich his entire civilization.
And before long, he did just that. Though there are several versions of the story and none of them seems entirely dependable, this much is clear: Greko saved his captain’s life when their vessel ran afoul of a Klingon bird-of-prey. As a reward, he was given a small fortune.
But that wasn’t enough for him. In the master stroke of all Ferengi master strokes, Greko then used that fortune to purchase an old, out-of-date warp drive from the normally hostile Breen.
To that point, few Ferengi had ever left Ferenginar, despite the 75th Rule of Acquisition (“Home is where the heart is, but the stars are made of latinum.”). But once they realized what Greko had brought home, the rush for the stars began—and Greko became DaiMon Greko, a famous and extremely well-remunerated ship’s captain.
Our hover passes a series of small, connected lakes that mirror the dark fury of the sky and the occasional burst of lightning. Apparently, 84 percent of Ferenginar is covered with such modest bodies of water.
After a while, Quark directs the hover driver to pull over in front of an interesting-looking mansion—one that’s shaped like a Terran ant trying to stand up on its hindmost legs.
At Quark’s suggestion, I pay the driver—who requests a substantial tip as well and refuses to let us out of his cab until he gets one. Quark’s expression indicates that I should honor the request, I give the driver an extra slip of latinum, hear him mumble something about hew-mons, and see the door slide open.
Quark and I pull our hoods up over our heads. As we remove ourselves from the hover, the sky seems to disappear and we’re hammered by the worst deluge yet. For a moment, I can’t see more than an inch or two in front of me. It’s as if I’ve gone blind as well as deaf. Then the rain lets up just enough for me to make out the mansion again.
“Come on,” Quark yells in my ear. Then he grabs my arm and pulls me in the direction of the front door.
The door has a stylized Ferengi head made of some dark metal for a knocker. Quark uses it to rap twice. A moment later the door swings open and my companion pulls me inside.
We’re greeted by a prosperous-looking Ferengi a bit shorter and a lot plumper than Quark. His name is Chek, I’m informed.
“Please to meet you,” I tell our ho
st. “I’m Sam Gooding of SubNet.”
Understanding dawns in Chek’s pudgy face. “Of course,” he says appraisingly. “The hew-mon reporter.”
I smile. “Exactly.”
“Welcome to my home,” says Chek. He hands me a padd. “Place your imprint on the legal waiver form and deposit your admission fee in the box by the umbrella stand. Remember, my house is my house.”
“As are its contents,” Quark replies accommodatingly.
“If you wish,” Chek adds, “you may buy a buffet ticket for two slips of latinum per person. We’re serving flaked blood fleas and baked locar beans this afternoon. Also, premium quality tube grubs.”
“Fresh?” Quark asks shrewdly.
“And slimy,” Chek tells him. “just the way you like them.”
I catch a whiff of something vaguely fishy in the next room. Quark seems to have caught the same scent. He licks his lips.
“Don’t forget the two hundred and fourteenth Rule of Acquisition,” Chek says. “‘Never begin a business negotiation on an empty stomach.’”
“This isn’t a business negotiation,” Quark points out.
“Everything’s a business negotiation,” Chek observes.
Quark considers the assertion. Then he says, “Point taken. Where do we purchase our tickets?”
Chek pumps his thumb over his shoulder. “See my wife in the corner there? She’ll be glad to help you.” As we move in the direction Chek’s indicated, our host greets the next conspirator in line.
Chek’s wife stands behind a small table beside the doorway into the next room. In accordance with the older Ferengi traditions, she’s completely naked. I try not to stare as Quark and I approach her.
“Two tickets for the buffet,” Quark tells her. He leans closer to me, grinning a sharp-toothed grin. “You can pay me back later, hew-mon. I think you’ll find the rate of interest quite reasonable.”
Star Trek: New Worlds, New Civilizations Page 5