Caveat Emptor Read online

  “What are you complaining about? I haven’t even touched you,” she said, lowering the medical tricorder.

  “And you’re not going to, at least until you’ve taken your clothes off!”

  “Sorry,” Lense said with a sigh, “never on a first date.”

  “Is there a problem?” Gomez asked, entering the room, flanked by Lt. Commander Corsi and one of the security guards, Andrea Lipinski.

  “More clothed females!” exclaimed the Ferengi. “This is an obscenity! First you seize my ship against my express wishes. Then you proceed to abduct me and subject me to this probing and inquisition, and now you surround me with clothed females!”

  “I thought the new Grand Nagus had lifted the restrictions against Ferengi women,” Gomez said.

  The Ferengi sneered. “Just because the nagushood was granted to an idiot who has spent too much time among humans such as yourselves doesn’t mean we have all turned our back on traditional values. I demand to speak to a male in charge!”

  “I’ve had enough of this,” Lense said. “Computer, activate Emergency Medical Hologram.”

  A dark-skinned, pleasant-faced figure materialized in the center of the room. “Good afternoon, Doctor,” the holographic physician, whom Lense had nicknamed “Emmett,” said.

  Lense handed Emmett her tricorder. “This patient requires a physical exam. If you’ll excuse me, Commander,” she added to Gomez, then went into her office.

  Emmett looked befuddled only for a moment, then started his examination. The Ferengi looked dubious, but was apparently satisfied that this was a male, even if he was a hologram, and didn’t balk at the exam.

  Gomez sighed. “I apologize for any distress, but it is part of Starfleet’s business to render aid and protection to the weak and the vulnerable. A lone escape craft adrift in deep space strikes me as being just that.”

  “I knew what I was doing, female,” the Ferengi said derisively. “There are dozens of worlds in the system where I could have made planetfall.”

  “According to our sensors, none of the worlds in this system can sustain humanoid life.”

  “Bah,” the Ferengi said, slumping his shoulders.

  Emmett said, “If you could please sit still, Mr.—?”

  “My name is Phug—DaiMon Phug.”

  Gomez frowned. The title of DaiMon was only given to ship captains in the Ferengi Alliance. “DaiMon Phug, what happened to your ship?” she asked. “Should we be searching for other lifepods?”

  “No … there’s no need … there aren’t any others. They’re all dead. When we lost containment … the warp field collapsed. There was scarcely time to reach the escape pods. I almost didn’t make it.”

  “I’m sorry for the loss of your crew.”

  “My crew? Pah! If they’d been up to snuff this never would have happened! I always knew it was a mistake signing on a chief engineer who couldn’t count to twenty without taking his shoes off. The Ferengi education system isn’t what it once was, you know.”

  “If you’ll permit the doctor to finish his examination, I’ll assign you quarters. We can discuss where you wish to be set down later. Would you like me to notify the Alliance that we’ve picked you up?”

  “No! I will see to it, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” To the hologram, she said, “Carry on, Emmett.”

  “Of course, Commander.”

  Gomez and Corsi left, Corsi nodding to Lipinski, indicating that she was to stay and keep an eye on the Ferengi.

  As soon as the doors closed behind them, Corsi said, “Commander, you know he’s lying, don’t you?”

  Nodding, Gomez said, “Through his pointy little teeth.” She tapped her combadge. “Gomez to Duffy.”

  “Go ahead, Sonnie.”

  Gomez shook her head. Part of her found it endearing when Duffy called her that, but it wasn’t entirely appropriate when they were both on duty. “Kieran, let me know as soon as you’re done going over the pod. Our guest says he barely escaped a containment breach. I want that verified.”

  “On it, but I’m not seeing any indications that this was near any kind of breach. Initial scan doesn’t show any of the usual particulate traces.”

  “No surprise there,” Corsi muttered.

  “Keep me posted, Kieran. Gomez out.”

  It was raining on Ferenginar.

  In fact, it always rained on Ferenginar—even during the alleged dry season when it simply rained less.

  Several xeno-anthropologists posited the radical theory that this consistently inclement weather was actually the cornerstone of the Ferengi culture. This was reflected in the Ferengi language itself, which had no less than one hundred and seventy-eight words for “rain”—and no word for “crisp.” With little else to do but huddle in their burrows while the deluge persisted, the early Ferengi would pass the long hours trying to work out ways of keeping warm, dry, and comfortable. They eventually came to the conclusion that the only practical solution to their problem primarily revolved around the acquisition of huge amounts of cash. It was the great thinker Gint (who later went on to become Ferenginar’s first Grand Nagus) who stated, “Money can’t buy you love but it can buy you an umbrella.”

  It was, some claimed, from this simple desire that the entire Ferengi social, political, and religious structure evolved to create the foremost trading race in known space. Ironically it also led, millennia later, to the creation of the only desert on Ferenginar.

  The Nimbi Massif was a vast rift valley terraformed into an arid, bone-dry expanse, its climate maintained by a series of colossal dehumidifiers. This change of environment enabled the valley to be lined with an array of parabolic baffles, transforming the entire geographic feature into a gigantic transceiver dish—a huge ear turned toward the sky. Via this dish, the Ferengi government could eavesdrop on interstellar communications, tracking the movements of stocks, shares, currency fluctuations, and investments across several sectors. Not to mention more politically sensitive data that had a price all its own.

  Consequently, the Nimbi Array was manned around the clock by a legion of eager listeners, all sifting, extrapolating, and interpreting the incoming material, aurally panning for nuggets of fiscal data from the great rivers of interstellar chatter.

  Interpolator Brusk was one such listener. He was also the first to encounter the heretic … but he wouldn’t be the last.

  Brusk had devoted almost six months to monitoring communications from Breen space. The Breen economy had been in turmoil ever since the fall of the Dominion and the reparations imposed by the Federation/Klingon/Romulan alliance, prompting them to consider selling the secrets behind their formidable technology. At one point during the war, the Breen energy-dissipating weapons almost brought the Alliance to its knees. Sensing that blood was in the water and a considerable return could be had, Brusk sat and waited and listened.

  Now his dedication was looking to pay off. The Breen government had gone into session to decide which course of action to take. Brusk knew that selling was their only option and he had requested a negotiating team to remain on standby, ready to approach the Breen with a deal within hours of their decision. Of course, in keeping with the great Ferengi tradition of shameless nepotism, the team included his two brothers and several nephews.

  Tugging at his right lobe with nervous excitement, Brusk leaned closer to his computer console, intently watching the screen as the internal communications traffic from within Breen space scrolled in front of him, the universal translator changing the complex Breen word forms into legible text. The session would finish any time now and the minutes of the meeting downloaded to their central files … via a brief detour to Ferenginar.

  Suddenly, the unfurling text vanished from the screen, replaced by a wash of static and white noise. Brusk moaned in disbelief. He tapped frantically at the keypad, desperately attempting to reboot the system, but to no avail. Brusk stood and peered over the partition at the Ferengi at the next work station. Rhut specialized in
Klingon commodities, mostly Kohlar beast bellies and bloodwine, but he was also pretty handy with computers. He’d charge Brusk through the nose to fix his machine but with the state of play so critical it was worth the outlay.

  Brusk put on his best poker face, ready to haggle. “Rhut, my console’s just crashed. I….”

  Rhut didn’t pay him any attention. He was too busy concentrating on the screen in front of him, his fingers dancing urgently over the keyboard.

  “So? Join the club,” he snapped. “But you better have backed up your files because it looks like the entire system’s gone down.”

  Brusk glanced out over the hangar-like expanse of the work floor. Hundreds of his fellow interpolators had abandoned their work stations and were gathered in nervous huddles. He could taste the panic in the air.

  This was bad. This was very bad.

  Then Rhut announced, “It’s back up!”

  The static had cleared, but the screen was now blank. As Brusk watched, a face began to resolve out of the gray nothingness. All the other Ferengi were as equally fixed to their screens. Whatever was happening, it was cutting in on all bandwidths and frequencies. The vast expanse of the Nimbi Array was receiving just one signal to the exclusion of all else.

  A Ferengi face filled the screen, but it wasn’t like any Ferengi Brusk had ever seen. The head was longer than normal, with fine, high cheekbones and an elegant, aquiline nose. The eyes were wide and compassionate. Even the lobes seemed to be more sculpted and swept back.

  The face was … beautiful. Brusk found it unsettling, but there was worse to come.

  The face smiled, showing two rows of white, even teeth. Brusk shuddered.

  “Peace, joy and contentment to you all, my brothers and sisters … I am Milia. I am coming home.”

  Brusk screamed …

  … along with every other Ferengi in the room.

  Sonya Gomez leaned against the wall of the turbolift, her arms crossed. She gently tapped the padd in her left hand against her chin.

  Duffy had been the very model of efficiency, and had produced a detailed report, with full spectrographic analysis of Phug’s lifepod. Gomez had then reviewed the system diagnostics and had reluctantly agreed with the findings. It was Gomez’s task as first officer to present the results and conclusions to her captain. Unfortunately, the answers Duffy had obtained only posed more questions.

  She sighed. Why did it have to be a Ferengi?

  Gomez had to admit that her opinions of the trader race were inevitably colored by her experiences aboard the Enterprise. About a year before she signed on to the Federation’s flagship as an engineer, Captain Picard had the first visual contact with the Ferengi. Since then, the ship had been involved in many encounters with the race, and Gomez, who, working in engineering, was often involved in cleaning up the mess left by the latest Ferengi scheme against the crew, had developed an unhealthy distrust of the race. That distrust was fostered by the fact that the Ferengi were the ones who opened the first trade relations with the Dominion. Gomez had always wondered in the back of her head whether or not the war would have turned out the way it did if it had been the Federation that made first contact instead of the Ferengi.

  Intellectually, she knew that her distrustful attitude was at odds with Starfleet’s all-embracing philosophy. She needed to get past it—especially today, dealing with Phug and his pod.

  The turbolift eased to a halt, the doors slid open onto the bridge. Duffy was at the conn, and he smiled at her. “Ready to give the captain the bad news?” he asked, getting up from the command chair.

  She nodded, and they both went into the ready room.

  “Tell me you have good news, Gomez,” Gold said.

  “I’m afraid not, sir. There’s no evidence of any damage at all. None of the particulate traces you’d expect from a warp core breach, minimal hull scarring, none of which matches what you’d get from an antimatter explosion, no radioactivity beyond the usual background radiation of space. And, before you ask, there’s no sign of distress from any kind of energy weapon—he wasn’t running from a firefight, either.”

  “Or,” Duffy added, “if he was, he did it without getting hit once, which is pretty unlikely in a pod with only type-two maneuvering thrusters.”

  Gold blew out a breath. “He was running from something. What would spook a Ferengi DaiMon that much?”

  “Someone’s found a way of replicating latinum?” Duffy joked.

  Indicating the padd’s screen, Gomez said, “One bit of good news—we know the course he took.”

  “Good,” Gold said. “Any information about Phug or his ship?”

  Gomez shook her head. “No, there wasn’t anything useful in the pod’s computer. I can’t imagine a Ferengi would put anything like that in an escape pod’s databank where anyone could access it without paying for the privilege.”

  “Good point.”

  Duffy rubbed his chin. “Might be worth putting a call in to Deep Space 9. See if our old pal Nog knows anything about Phug.”

  Gomez remembered that Lieutenant Nog—the first Ferengi to ever join Starfleet and the chief operations officer of DS9—had worked with the da Vinci crew at Empok Nor a while back. Gomez herself hadn’t been around for that, busy as she was with a mission to Sarindar, but she did know one thing: Nog was the son of the new Grand Nagus, Rom. Rom himself was a former engineer on DS9—that was the time spent among humans that Phug had found so distasteful—and the architect of the brilliant self-replicating mine-field that had held the Dominion in check for precious, valuable months while the Federation amassed its forces.

  “Couldn’t hurt,” Gold said with a nod. “Have McAllan get in touch with Nog and have Wong backtrack Phug’s course. My curiosity’s been piqued now.”

  “Mine, too,” Gomez said. “It’s not like Phug himself has been forthcoming.”

  Within ten minutes, Wong had set a course back along the pod’s route and McAllan had sent a message to Deep Space 9.

  Within fifteen minutes, the da Vinci was rocked by a gravity wave of some kind. “All stop!” Gomez said. “Captain Gold to the bridge.”

  “Answering all stop,” Wong said.

  “What the hell was that?” Gold said as he entered the bridge.

  “Some kind of gravity wave,” Duffy said from an aft engineering station. “Something’s generating a massive field, but we’re not picking up anything except normal space.”

  “Damage report,” Gomez said to McAllan as she vacated the command chair for Gold.

  McAllan checked his status board. “No significant damage. A few bumps and bruises.”

  “We’re picking something up now,” Duffy said. “Wow.”

  Gomez joined Duffy at the console. “Could you be a little more specific?”

  “Not really,” Duffy said. “Take a look.”

  She looked at his console, and saw an amazing sight. “Wow,” she said. “Put it on the main viewer, Kieran.”

  Everyone turned to the viewscreen, which now displayed a Ferengi Merchantman. A floating commerce vessel, it was a virtual city in space. Never a race to allow aesthetics get in the way of practicalities, they had designed the Merchantman as an enormous version of their regular Ferengi vessels, but absurdly large—five decks where there was one on the original. It gleamed a tarnished gold, somehow brassy in the blackness of space. It was at once ludicrous and threatening.

  Gold was actually open-mouthed. “How the hell did that thing appear out of nowhere?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Duffy said, “but it didn’t register on the sensors until we came within fifty thousand kilometers of it.”

  “Try to hail them, McAllan,” Gold said.

  “Aye, sir.”

  Moving to stand next to the operations console, Gomez asked the Bajoran woman seated there, “Mar, what can you tell me about the ship?”

  “Registry lists it as the Ferengi Merchantman Debenture of Triple-Lined Latinum,” Ina Mar said.

  “That’s a mouthf
ul,” Wong muttered with a smile.

  Ina continued: “Three kilometers in diameter, crew capacity of thirty thousand, though I can’t get any definitive lifesigns right now. According to the database, it’s owned and operated by DaiMon Phug.”

  Duffy grinned. “We have a winner.”

  Gold turned to McAllan. “Where’s Phug now?”

  “Emmett gave him a physical—he checked out fine. Corsi stuck him in the mess hall with two guards on him.”

  Frowning, Gold repeated, “Emmett gave him a physical?”

  “The DaiMon had a problem being examined by a ‘fee-male,’” Gomez said, impersonating the way Phug had sneered the word in sickbay.

  Gold grumbled something, then said, “Put a call through to him. And keep trying to raise that monster out there.”

  Phug’s high-pitched whine of a voice came on a moment later. “I demand an explanation for this disruption of my well-being!”

  “This is Captain Gold. We were retracing your pod’s route. It took us right to your ship.”

  “You found my ship?”

  Gomez shot a glance at Gold. Phug had been indignant—now he was out-and-out scared.

  “Get … us … out … of … here … now!”

  Before Gold could reply, the ship shook again. “Report!” the captain bellowed.

  “We’ve been caught in a tractor beam,” Duffy said.

  “Break us loose,” Gold said to Wong.

  Wong tried to activate the impulse engines, but the da Vinci didn’t move. “We can’t break free, Captain.”

  “You fools!” came Phug’s voice—at once smug and scared. “You’ve doomed us all!”

  Phug was not happy about being escorted to the da Vinci bridge—especially not by two clothed females. What he wanted was to be taken to his escape pod so he could use it to escape again. Maybe this time he’d find a planet where he could lie low for a bit and reestablish himself, rather than a Starfleet ship that insisted on bringing him back to the very thing he was trying to escape from. He was sure they were lying about there being no habitable planets in the system. You couldn’t trust humans….