Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine® Volume Three Read online

  Grudgingly, Joq said, “All right, I admit they were off there, but—”

  Bindu smiled. “And then, of course, they reported that ridiculous story about how the Grand Nagus’s paramour was rescued from the Dominion by a team of Ferengi commandoes on some abandoned Cardassian station. I mean really, Joq, you didn’t believe that nonsense, did you?”

  “And what if they’re right about the nagus, eh?” Joq asked, pointing a finger at Bindu. “He broke a contract. And a contract is a contract—”

  “—is a contract, yes I know the Rules, Joq.”

  “Ha!” Joq kept pointing, his finger now digging into Bindu’s jacket, which was simply ruining its lines. “You wouldn’t know the Rules of Acquisition if they sharpened your teeth for you! I’m telling you, this is just the latest in a series. Do you know the market is down a hundred points? Well? Did you?”

  Sighing, Bindu said, “I told you I watched FCN this morning, didn’t I?”

  “And stocks are dropping all over the Alliance. It’s a good thing I sold my shares in Slug-O-Cola last week, or I’d be destitute by now!”

  “My stocks dropped too,” Bindu said patiently, “but not catastrophically.”

  “And you aren’t worried?”

  Bindu shook his head. “Every time the Grand Nagus sneezes, the market goes down a few points and stocks drop. It’ll pass.”

  “A hundred points is not ‘a few’! The last time the market crashed that badly—”

  “—was when Zek was sick for a day. It was an unnecessary panic, as Zek proved the next day.” The aircar arrived. Bindu pulled his two-strip fare out of his pocket. “Honestly, Joq, you have no sense of history.”

  “I don’t have a sense of history?” Joq cried as he pulled out his own two strips and got onto the aircar.

  As usual, there weren’t any seats. There never were this close to the capital city.

  Joq continued his harangue once they’d settled into the aircar, each having paid the one-strip fee for holding on to the pole. “You’re the one who doesn’t have a sense of history, my friend. Ferengi history is a long and noble one, and one that doesn’t include females earning profit—or wearing clothes. It doesn’t include benefits for workers, either.”

  The aircar lurched, forcing Bindu to grip the pole more tightly. It wasn’t that windy out, and Bindu wondered if it was a different driver today. The aircar company kept the drivers out of sight of the passengers, as it kept their insurance rates down.

  “I don’t see you complaining about getting to take a vacation,” Bindu said as the aircar took another lurch.

  “Of course not—I need a vacation from the supervisor. He hates giving us breaks, hates having to pay overtime, and takes it out on us. It’s been miserable at work since the reforms came in.”

  “Really?” This genuinely surprised Bindu. “But my office has been wonderful. Productivity is up, profits are up—and yes, wages are down overall since we have to pay income tax, but it’s looking very likely that we’ll get a higher-than-usual salary bump next year.”

  Joq looked at Bindu like he was crazy—which was fitting, since that was how Bindu also saw Joq. “That’s madness. How can work be improved?”

  “Well, everyone wants to go to work now that it’s a pleasant place to be. Makes us all want to do better for the boss. And you know what? It’s working! Soon I’ll have saved enough to buy that house in the suburbs.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” Joq asked.

  Bindu pretended to think about it, counting off notions on his fingers. “Well, let’s see, I’d have more space than I have now. I’d actually get a seat on the aircar.” Then he opened a third finger and looked right at Joq. “And I won’t have to talk to you every day.”

  “Laugh all you want, but mark my words—this is the end of Ferenginar as we know it. Rom will run us into ruin!”

  Before Bindu could reply, the aircar lurched again. Definitely a different driver. His grip on the pole became white-knuckled. He looked out the window to see the Tower of Commerce, glowing in the gloom of the day in the center of the capital city, its spire climbing into the cumulus clouds like a lightning rod, a beacon of hope to Ferengi everywhere. Maybe if I get that promotion, I’ll get the office with the view of the Tower. Got to remember to check the account I’ve been saving up the bribe money in.

  As the vehicle began its descent, the final ad of the ride appeared in a holographic display projected over everyone’s heads from the ceiling. It was always the same set of ads every day, and Bindu had long since learned to tune them out, but this last one was different. He’d never heard the music before, but it was a rather catchy jingle.

  A very honest-looking Ferengi asked, “Tired of the same old same old? You should be. It’s time for something new. So wipe that green slime off your lips and go for today’s soda: Eelwasser.”

  The image switched to another Ferengi that looked familiar to Bindu. He was holding a bottle of Eelwasser.

  “I’m Congressman Brunt. When I joined the FCA, I drank Slug-O-Cola, but now I know better. Like any good member of the Economic Congress of Advisors, I go with what works now —and that means Eelwasser.” He took a long sip of the liquid, then wiped his lips with a sleeve. “Ah, refreshing. When I’m Grand Nagus—which I hope, for the sake of Ferenginar, will be soon—I’ll make Eelwasser the official drink of the nagal residence, because I believe in doing what’s right.”

  Brunt was replaced with the Eelwasser logo. A voice said, “Sponsored by Chek Pharmaceuticals on behalf of the Brunt for Grand Nagus Campaign.” Then the logo and the jingle, which had been playing in the background the entire time, faded.

  Bindu frowned. “We already have a Grand Nagus.”

  “If we’re lucky, this Brunt fella will take over,” Joq said. “You heard him, he used to be FCA. They understand real Ferengi ways.”

  “I don’t want a Grand Nagus who drinks Eelwasser. That stuff is vile.”

  The aircar came in for a landing, though the driver apparently was having a hard time coordinating the braking thrusters with the ground. Bindu felt the half-digested arachnids he’d swallowed for breakfast creeping back up his throat, and was grateful that the ride was over.

  As they milled with the crowd toward the aircar’s exit, Joq said, “Who cares what he drinks? As long as he isn’t Rom. Besides, you heard who’s backing him—Chek Pharmaceuticals. They’re a good business, and don’t have any connections to politics. They’re not insiders like Slug-O-Cola.”

  “What do you mean, ‘insiders’?” Bindu asked, thinking that Joq was crazier even than usual this morning.

  “Nilva, the head of Slug-O, is on the Congress.”

  This was the craziest argument Bindu had ever heard, and he’d been arguing with Joq for years. “So’s Brunt.”

  “Yes, but he was only just appointed a few days ago. He’s an outsider who’ll bring Ferenginar back to the old ways, before Rom and his cronies got control of it.”

  They exited the aircar. Bindu pulled out the three strips he’d need to pay to use the tunnel from the aircar terminal to his office building. Joq went in a different direction, as he preferred to walk in the rain to the Zalp Building.

  “Whatever you say, Joq.” That was what Bindu always said when they went their separate ways. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Assuming Ferenginar’s still standing tomorrow.”

  Bindu went off to work. As he paid the three strips to enter the tunnel, he found himself whistling the jingle to the Eelwasser ad he’d just seen.

  6

  Never make fun of a Ferengi’s mother….

  —RULE OF ACQUISITION #31

  “Ow!”

  For the sixth time in as many minutes, Nog hit his head on the ceiling of the crawlspace. The bellow of pain allowed the penlight to fall out of his mouth, where he’d clenched it between his teeth.

  The tunnel wasn’t this small the last time I was here, he thought irritably, as he resisted the urge to rub his crown.
Instead, he picked up the penlight, put it back between his molars, and forced himself to soldier onward.

  It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Nog recalled from his youth on Ferenginar that Grandfather’s house had a secret crawlway that led to an equally secret hatchway buried in the Gleb Jungle. Nog had found out about it from one of Grandfather’s servants, who explained that one of the house’s previous owners had it built as a way of escaping his creditors in case of bad times. The servant was also fairly sure that Grandfather didn’t know a thing about it.

  Mindful of Grandmoogie’s words from yesterday, Nog had taken care to use this old crawlspace, in which he used to hide regularly as a boy whenever he wanted to get away from Grandfather—which was fairly often—so he would not be seen. It had been slower going than Nog had anticipated, mainly because he didn’t realize how much he had grown since he was five. Nog was short even by Ferengi standards, and he wondered as he made his slow-but-sure way down the tunnel how the previous owner ever thought this would make a good getaway method.

  I get the feeling that, when Jake and Korena talked me into seeing Mother, this wasn’t what they had in mind….

  For perhaps the first time ever, Nog was grateful for his artificial leg. The biosynthetic limb, lost during the Dominion War at AR-558, had mostly served as an unpleasant reminder of the horrors of combat. Today, though, Nog was thankful that only one of his legs was cramping up from the confined space.

  Just a little bit farther. The doorway into Grandfather’s basement was coming into view in the beam of his penlight. I just hope that Grandfather never found out about this tunnel. Or if he did, that he didn’t seal it. It had taken half an hour to crawl all the way here from the jungle hatch—after spending the better part of the day searching for the hatch while slogging waist-deep through the sludge. The Gleb Jungle had remained undeveloped only because several attempts to build on the swampland had served only to make matters worse. The last three owners of the land had foreclosed on it after financially disastrous construction attempts, and it now lay untouched and overgrown, considered a huge bad-luck charm. So Nog was not surprised to find that the hatch was still there. It had taken only a moment to bypass the locking mechanism. Few locks can stand up to Ferengi ingenuity and Starfleet training, Nog thought with pride.

  Finally, he reached the end of the line, an occasion he marked by hitting his head on the ceiling a seventh time. “Ow!”

  This time, Nog did take a moment to rub his crown. He feared there’d be a bruise up there. Times like this, I wish I was back on the station. Dr. Bashir doesn’t charge to take a look at a head injury.

  The lock on the entrance to the basement was of the same manufacture as the one on the hatch, and it took Nog even less time to pick this one. He made a note of the manufacturer, and reminded himself to make a decision later—either sell his method of picking the lock to the manufacturer so they’d be able to account for it in later products, or sell it to the manufacturer’s biggest competitor. Or both, he thought with a grin.

  As soon as he opened the door, the lovely smell of rotting plants wafted across his nostrils. I see Grandfather still has the mold farm. Nog wondered if his grandfather had finally, after twenty years, figured out a way to turn a profit on the thing.

  Grateful he’d remained in uniform, Nog jumped from the doorway into the ankle-high swampwater. The lower half of his uniform was already a mess from wading around in the jungle all day. His Starfleet uniform was better insulated—and easier to clean—than any of his civilian clothes, which would have been ruined or necessitated an exorbitant cleaning fee.

  The basement was dark—the mold didn’t do well in the light—so Nog shined his penlight around looking for a switch before he’d take the risk of speaking out loud. Not that I’m being all that stealthy wading through swampwater, he thought with annoyance. Few houses on Ferenginar had basements, and those that did were usually blessed with plenty of swampwater. Grandfather had tried to take advantage of this inevitability by breeding mold, with limited success.

  “Oh, it’s you.”

  Nog whirled around toward the voice, which came from the top of the staircase. He saw a middle-aged Ferengi with ears that were starting to droop, bags under the eyes, and puffed-out cheeks: Dav, father to Prinadora, grandfather to Nog.

  “What’re you doing here, boy?”

  Noticing that Grandfather was holding a several-decades-old Starfleet-issue phaser on his grandson, Nog didn’t move. Not that the old Ferengi needed the weapon. All of Nog’s memories of Dav were of an old man who was constantly yelling, hitting, screaming, and punching, and those memories were burbling up to the fore right now.

  “Uh, I came here to see my mother.”

  “So you came in through the basement?”

  “I didn’t want to be seen. How did you know I was here, Grandfather?”

  Snorting, the old man lowered the phaser. “Don’t go calling me that, boy. Your father made it clear that I wasn’t family anymore.”

  “The way I remember it,” Nog said tersely, “that was your idea.” Nog also noticed that Grandfather—that Dav—hadn’t answered the question. Nog hadn’t detected any alarms, but he could have missed something.

  “Look,” Dav said, “it didn’t matter none when your father was a failure, working for his brother on some Cardassian space station in the middle of nowhere. Even after they found that wormhole, your father was nothing. But now? Grand Nagus? That’s just wrong.”

  This didn’t sound like the old man who loved to intimidate Nog so much that he drove the youth to hide in crawlspaces. Then again, it has been a long time.

  “My father hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  Dav raised the weapon again. “You’re kidding, right? He married someone else—he’s having another kid. He broke the contract.”

  A thought occurred to Nog. “So did she!”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Father told me that Mother remarried after you swindled him out of everything he owned.”

  “I didn’t swindle anybody!”

  Now Dav’s menacing tone of yore was coming back, and Nog was sorry he’d provoked him. He tried to keep his biological leg from shaking. Intellectually, he knew that he was an adult now, a war veteran with Starfleet combat training, and Dav was no longer the intimidating giant that he was to the five-year-old Nog. But old habits die hard—especially when the other guy’s also holding a phaser on me….

  Dav continued. “And your mother never remarried. She spent time with another man, but they never married. She wanted to—I wanted her to—but we weren’t about to break a contract. We ain’t that kind of Ferengi.”

  A likely story. Nog didn’t buy any of this, but he wasn’t the one holding the phaser. Instead, he tried a more diplomatic tack. “Look, we can argue about this all day, but—I just want to see my mother.”

  “Too bad. ’Cause she doesn’t want to see you.”

  Nog was aghast. “I’m her son.”

  “So? All you’ll do is remind her of pain. She didn’t mind being separated from Rom before, but now? Going all over the planet with that Bajoran hussy? Having their child? You know, all anyone can talk about is that damn kid. I won’t tolerate it, and I won’t tolerate you in my house upsetting my daughter. Get out.”

  Dammit, Nog thought. Ever since Jake and Korena encouraged him, he found that he was really looking forward to seeing Prinadora again.

  He thought about Jake, losing his mother to the Borg when he was only a little bit older than Nog had been when he and Father left for Terok Nor. He thought about Shar, and the tremendous impact his zhavey had had on his life. He thought about Prynn and her obsessive quest to find her mother, leading to such a tragic end in the Gamma Quadrant, one that drove a wedge between her and her father, Commander Vaughn. And he thought about Father and Uncle Quark, and what they—along with Nog himself—went through to rescue Grandmoogie from the Dominion two years ago.

  All he knew of
his mother was a vague recollection from when he was too young to realize that they’d be the only memories he’d have.

  Yes, he wanted to help Father and stop Brunt from his latest attempt to destroy their family. But I also want to see my mother.

  However, it was quite obvious that Dav wasn’t going to let that happen.

  “All right, I’ll leave.” He started sloshing through the swampwater toward the staircase.

  “Hold it right there.” Dav was waving the phaser toward the door to the tunnel. “You can go back the way you came, boy. I don’t want you tracking swampwater in my house.”

  Nog looked at the door he’d broken through. Great, I’m only just getting full feeling back in my leg. His hip was starting to ache, too.

  Bowing to the inevitable, and now very sorry he hadn’t brought a phaser of his own with him—or borrowed Ro’s before coming here—he sloshed over to the entry.

  He took one look back at his grandfather. “Will you at least tell her I was here?”

  “I said get out, boy!”

  Turning back toward the doorway, he climbed up, put the penlight once again between his teeth, and started his slow crawl back to the jungle.

  It’s official, Ro thought, I’m sick of Ferengi.

  She wasn’t sure what it was that put her over the edge. She’d spent two days alone in a transport with three Ferengi—Quark, Nog, and the pilot. She’d spent two more days on Ferenginar. If they had any offworld tourist industry, it wasn’t visible in the nagal residence or in the Tower of Commerce. Aside from the Bolian in the spaceport, the Vulcan at the aircar kiosk, and two Gallamites standing outside the Tower gazing up at it from ground level, Ro hadn’t seen a single non-Ferengi since leaving Deep Space 9.

  It wasn’t even that she minded their company—much. Most of the people she’d been dealing with were, in fact, very solicitous. Given that they were the nagal serving staff, who were more than happy to provide her with anything she needed and more than she wanted, that didn’t surprise her. Even with the cloud currently hanging over Rom, he was still the Grand Nagus and Ro was still his guest.