Yes, I must think of Odo, he told himself, finally slumping onto his cot and falling into a troubled sleep.
Dukat knotted his hands beneath his desk, fighting to keep his expression free of contempt as the Ferengi stepped into his office. Quark, he called himself. Dukat wondered if he should have asked Thrax to attend this little meeting. He didn’t want to seem mistrustful, to put the creature on the defensive, but one couldn’t be too careful when it came to Ferengi. And what did this one intend, now that his ship had stranded him on the station? Dukat wished very much that he could avoid even addressing the topic. He had considered having the man arrested on some trumped-up charge or other, but Thrax was strangely reluctant to make arrests under what he considered a “dishonest” premise. It was a trait that had led Dukat to consider his reassignment more than once.
“You’ve asked to speak to me?” Dukat began.
“Yes, Your, uh, Highness. You see, I don’t want to go back to my homeworld. There’s trouble waiting there for me. I don’t really have many options at the moment, and I’m wondering if it might be possible for me to…stay…here.”
Dukat did not answer him. Quark had a crafty look to him, his eyes bright with it, but at least he wasn’t going to cower and bootlick, as Dukat had half expected.
“I have money,” the creature insisted. “My father left me an inheritance. It’s just a matter of getting the bank on Ferenginar to transfer the funds to a local depository so I can access it. I could rent a room from you, maybe even start a business here. You’d do well to have a savvy entrepreneur such as myself on your station.” Quark grinned, exposed his pointed teeth. “I could bring in travelers from all over the galaxy, give a bit of notoriety to this spot. Maybe you’d be able to establish better trade relationships if your station had a little more to offer. Maybe you’d be able to—”
“I don’t really like Ferengi,” Dukat said.
“Well, I suppose you’re not alone in that,” Quark said smoothly, “but I must tell you that my people have been victim to a great deal of slander and misrepresentation. We’re trying to make our way in the galaxy, just like everyone else, and we have no interest in conflict—all we want is to make a little money for ourselves. The truth is, fortune generally follows a Ferengi whenever he sets up a business venture on another world. You might be surprised to learn that on some worlds, Ferengi are considered good luck.”
Dukat stared. “Is that so?”
“Yes, it’s true,” Quark said. He hadn’t been so bold as to sit, but he leaned on one of the chairs in front of Dukat’s desk, the picture of casual arrogance. “Many people regard matters of economics to be something of a mystery, but it’s not like that to my people. Wherever we go, prosperity goes with us. A wise man might be looking for a way to share in a bit of that prosperity—”
“If you’re going to stay here,” Dukat interrupted, “I’m going to need to see the money up front. I’m not talking about credit, either. I’m not talking about a thumbscan on a padd, or a signature. I’m talking about hard currency, Mister Quark.”
“Currency, sure. I can get you that. I can do whatever you want. Just let me stay, Mister Dukat. Let me—”
“It’s Gul Dukat.”
“Gul Dukat, right. So, you’ll let me stay, won’t you?” The Ferengi had assumed a begging posture, his wrists pressed together in a strange demonstration of supplication.
“Hard currency,” Dukat repeated.
The Ferengi nodded again, his hands clasped together now in what Dukat perceived as feigned gratitude. “Would you consider working out some kind of a deal? Perhaps we could conceive of a system where you might offer some kind of a discount—reliant on my timely payment, of course—but then if I were to go into delinquency, you could charge a penalty. It would be a clever way for you to make a profit from—”
“I’m not interested in making a deal,” Dukat told the Ferengi. “I just want to see my money. By the end of the day, preferably. Otherwise, there are plenty of transports out of here with a reasonable likelihood of providing you passage on credit.”
Quark did not look happy, his bright eyes narrowing slightly, the massive ears on either side of his head seeming almost to droop. Dukat dismissed him, feeling comfortable that he would not have to see more of this Ferengi after today.
The Ferengi stopped at the door, turned to look at Dukat again. “I wonder if I might be able to interest you in something other than money. You see, the crew of my freighter left me several crates of unreplicated foodstuffs in the cargo bay—goods of the very finest quality—but I don’t know if I have the means to unload so much product without a go-between. Perhaps you’d be interested in—”
“I have no use for Ferengi fare,” Dukat said with some disgust. What the Ferengi called food, Cardassians paid good money to have exterminated.
“It’s not only Ferengi cuisine I’ve got in there,” Quark insisted. “I have contacts and suppliers all over the galaxy. I routinely purchased all kinds of foreign delicacies—anything I could get below cost, I acquired—although my DaiMon didn’t always care for cuisine from Benzar, or Andor. A man such as yourself probably has a much broader palate than an idiot like Gart, though, am I right?”
Dukat sighed. “I don’t think so, Mister Quark.”
Quark looked even more unhappy than he did before. “That’s perishable cargo,” he muttered to himself. “There must be someone around here who can appreciate—”
“I’m sure you’ll do fine. Now, if you don’t mind…”
The Ferengi nodded to him, somewhat compulsively, before finally taking his leave, and Dukat let out the breath he had been holding. He found the Ferengi to have something of an objectionable odor, a smell that reminded Dukat of Bajor’s swamps—of moss and muck and the larvae of biting insects. He couldn’t imagine that anyone would have an interest in food offered by this man, not unless it was a person who was starving to death.
Doctor Mora’s primary job was to calibrate the equipment for Doctor Reyar as she prepared the computer systems on Terok Nor, to process the new transmissions from the surface. He was somewhat in awe of the station, and it certainly felt strange to have left the walls of the institute, walls with which he had grown contemptuously familiar in the past seven years.
“Doctor Mora, must I again remind you to concentrate on your work?” Reyar’s crisp voice interrupted Mora’s thoughts as he looked around the computer core, its strange colors and severe angles such a far cry from Bajoran design. The air was hot and dry. He felt as though he were in the epicenter of the Cardassian mind, surrounded as he was by these foreign terminals and flashing streams of Cardassian alphanumerics. Would the whole of Bajor someday look like this? Mora hoped he would not live to see it.
“I…apologize,” he stammered, and turned back to his work, slowly pecking at his keypad. He knew Cardassian characters well enough now, but his fluency would always be stilted. It might have been different if he had learned the language as a child instead of as an adult—pointless to even think of it; he suffered enough for not being Cardassian. And there was the matter of the Cardassians’ eidetic memory, though Mora had long since learned that it was less developed in some than in others—and Reyar fell into the category of those who struggled. He felt reasonably certain that her intelligence and ability at rote memorization were somewhat on a par with his own, but that did not still his fear of her. Of all of them.
Mora helped her develop the recognition software that would process telemetry from each of the scanning stations that had been built on Bajor’s surface. Erected by labor crews of Bajorans that had been recruited from the hill territories of each continent, the towers would transmit constant scans of Bajoran airspace, searching for non-Cardassian flyers. If the system detected an unauthorized craft, particle beam weapons would lock onto the transgressor and blow it out of the sky. The system would go online at the end of this week, but Mora had an idea to get word to the resistance before then. It was a long shot, and it was dangerous, but Mora felt that he had to take the chance. His cousin, a farmer in the village of Ikreimi, had always claimed to know someone who was affiliated with the freedom fighters. If Mora could send word to his parents, asking to have his cousin come and visit him at the institute, he might be able to pass on some valuable information before it was too late…