Ro had taken a seat behind the bar, a long, black slab with rows and rows of tall colored bottles behind it. A man—Ro supposed it was a man—with bright blue skin and a ridge bisecting his hairless face approached her. “What’ll it be, girlie?”
Ro cleared her throat, looking around for Cardassians. She saw none, but she still wanted to keep as low a profile as she could. She wasn’t sure what to order. “Copal?”she said uncertainly.
“What’s that?” He turned an ear in her direction.
“I said copal—copalcider? Do you have it?”
The man wrinkled his nose. “Where you from, Miss?”
Ro looked around again, before she answered, quietly. “Bajor,” she muttered.
“Speak up!” the bartender told her.
Ro’s gaze froze when she saw someone in the back corner of the room, bald as the bartender, but with a swollen, misshapen head. His skin was an unfortunate shade of orange, his mouth full of teeth so sharp and crooked he could not close it all the way. He wore a strange headband with a couple of flaps that concealed the back part of his head, along with a dark-colored uniform trimmed with fur. He was picking at a plate of ghastly-looking food, and frequently using some kind of tool to remove bits of it from between the varied nooks and crannies of his teeth. But it was his ears that caught Ro’s attention; they were round, and cavernous, and gigantic. Bis had expressly instructed her to look for the person with the most prominent ears. This man’s ears were nothing if not prominent. She felt certain she’d just found DaiMon Gart.
“Excuse me,” Ro told the blue bartender.
“Oh, no you don’t,” the man said. “You’d better order something if you want to sit in here. Only paying customers cool their heels on my chairs, you got it?”
“Tell you what,” Ro whispered. “I have thirty leks that’re all yours, and you don’t even need to pour me a drink.”
The bartender glared at her with suspicion. “What’s the catch?”
Ro leaned in closer. “I want a look at the Ferengi’s tab.” The bartender hesitated, perhaps trying to convince himself that the request was harmless. “I just want to see it,” Ro assured him. “Nothing else.”
“Let’s see the money,” the bartender said.
Ro held up the brown metal hexagon she’d been clutching since she entered the bar, something she’d taken off the body of a dead Cardassian soldier months ago. Union currency was ugly, but it had considerable value in this part of space. Ro was glad she had decided to save it. “Do we have a deal?”
The bartender glanced past her, as if to make sure the Ferengi wasn’t listening. Then he reached toward the counter behind him and produced a padd, which he held facedown on the bar. Ro gave him the coin, and the blue hand flipped the padd over.
Ro found what she was looking for immediately. Gart’s food and drink order didn’t interest her, but the two strings of numbers in the upper right corner of the screen gave her an immediate surge of adrenaline: the transponder code for the daimon’s ship, and the number of its docking bay—both of which would be essential to pay for anything in a place like this, in lieu of hard currency. Ro had just enough time to commit the numbers to memory before the bartender said, “That’s enough,” and took back his padd.
Ro thanked the bartender and made for the exit, past the table where Gart was sitting. She hesitated to listen to what he was saying to the person seated opposite him, an alien woman with her scarlet hair in a complicated topknot.
“What a lot of clothing you’re wearing!” he exclaimed. “You know, I like that in a girl. Clothing. Especially the part where the clothing all comes off.” He laughed, and bits of what appeared to be wormviolently dislodged themselves from his mouth as he did so. Ro shuddered.
“If my cook weren’t trying to poison me,” she overheard him say as she left the bar, “I’d never pay this much for a plate of greeworms. I tell you, he’s had it in for me since he left Ferenginar, but it’s his own fault for getting into the mess with the sub-nagus’s sister—”
Ro could no longer hear him as she found her way outside in the thin, cold atmosphere of the moon. It was dark here; apparently this part of the moon never entirely faced the sun, and the only light right now was from artificial sources posted between the shabby and sparse buildings that spread out from the spaceport. This moon’s sole purpose was as a stopover for travelers…especially those interested in conducting illicit business.
Ro made her way toward the spaceport’s secure hangar facility, constructed of enormous steel girders and smart-plastic dividers backed with force fields to separate the ships. Her first objective would be to break in and find the correct hangar where the Ferengi vessel was docked.
Minutes later, she found it, the massive, awkward vessel looking very much like the one she’d tried to steal years ago, the one that currently lay in pieces at the hangar on Valo II. Ro wasted no time in disabling the force field that would allow her access to the bay. Her next problem would be getting past the Ferengi ship’s security features, and while she knew the DaiMon was preoccupied, she knew nothing of the rest of the ship’s crew—he’d mentioned a cook, and Ro was nervous at the thought that there could be more than one or two other Ferengi aboard. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she’d have to deal with anyone other than Gart. Well, she only needed to get as far as the cargo bay.
She hitched up the satchel around her waist; it held her phaser, comm unit, and the small electrical device that she would soon be leaving inside the vessel. This is it,she told herself, and began working at overriding the controls to the drop ramp.
The minutes ticked by. Ro’s forehead was slippery with perspiration, but she could not spare a moment to wipe her eyes. How much longer would Gart be preoccupied? If he was successful in his pursuit of the alien woman at the bar, would he bring her back to the ship? It seemed to take forever before the drop ramp began to slowly descend, and Ro scampered inside, finding a shuttlebay much like the one where she had once docked her own raider. She’d walked the remnants of that long-ago ship several times with Bis only yesterday, memorizing its layout. In seconds, she was in the cargo bay, surrounded by massive nonmetallic containers filled with unprocessed uridium. She shivered as she removed the electrical discharge device from her satchel and programmed it to react directly with the impact of the locking clamps at Terok Nor. Then she aimed the bomb’s makeshift conducting spike at one of the containers, raised it over her head, and stabbed it through the casing.
She thought she heard voices coming from somewhere to the rear left of the cargo bay, and she quickly scuttled out the way she had come, not stopping to put the drop ramp back up as she ran, removing the comm device from her satchel and placing it in the pocket of her tunic. Once clear of the shipyards, she squeezed the device once, and, like magic, found herself once again on the transporter platform of the little warp ship.
I did it,she thought, and knew that Bis would be happy.
Odo usually had very little control of his senses while he regenerated, though certain external stimuli could rouse him from his state of near slumber. And as it was, something had forced him out of stasis on this particular night. Something was not right in the laboratory, though Odo had no concept of what it might be; he only knew that there was a sound coming from somewhere outside the door of Doctor Mora’s laboratory, and at this time of night, there should be no sounds at all. He remained a liquid, but he poised himself to be ready to morph into something else if he needed to, though he wasn’t sure what that thing might be.