Fools And Acquisition

Posted on Jan 12, 2016 @ 12:06am by Lieutenant James Barton
Edited on on Jan 12, 2016 @ 12:07am

Mission: Promethean

Fools and Acquisition
(Continued from 'Sweet Things')

=[/\]=


“A bigot is simply a sociologist without credentials.” - Dinesh D'Souza


=[/\]=


LOCATION: The Annabelle's Lament
SCENE: Bridge
TIME INDEX: During 'The Big Score'

He took a breath - five seconds now – and repeated the words to himself.

*Rule 22: A wise man can hear profit in the wind.*


He repeated the words silently to himself, again and again, as he stared desperately at the readings on his flight control, remembering his earlier calculations, imagining the ship screaming across unimaginable space. He demanded a steady breathing rhythm from himself, and used it count off the seconds.

Some folks said there was no wind in space, only shifting gravity wells and the turbulence of cosmic radiation, but he knew differently. The wind was what the stonebeaks soared within above the swamps of Ferenginar, eternally hunting for slither eels, and subsisting instead on digfish because the Ferengi had hunted the eels to extinction millennia ago. If you could soar through the gravity wells and the radiation the way the stonebeaks rode the unstable thermal currents of the swamps, then you could hear the wind. And a wise man can hear profit in the wind.


He took another breath. Four seconds now.


So he had learned to fly. He was well below the age of maturity when he'd cajoled his mother into her consent for the lessons. She had been horrified at the potential danger, but they both knew that for all her womanly fretting, she'd never been able to deny him what he wanted. His ineffectual lump of a father had, of course, had nothing to say about the matter. Within a year, he had all but mastered flying on thrusters and demanded the opportunity to learn to fly a ship under impulse power. She had resorted to wailing and begging, imploring him to focus his studies instead on accounting and business – safe, reliable careers with predictable profit margins and plenty of opportunities for creative bookkeeping strategies. He adored his mother, as all true Ferengi did, but she was still a woman, thus weak, and never had a chance of dissuading him with her meager intellect. Inevitably, she relented.


The cost of his instruction strained the family's finances terribly; he knew because he could hear his mother bemoaning it to his father when they thought him asleep, alternately demanding and pleading that her husband do *something* to either steer their son away from this ridiculous fancy or to bring in more money so that they wouldn't descend to starvation. All the while, he could hear the fat waste, and could almost see him waggling his oversize head and his undersized ears, while he wheezed, “He doesn't listen, he never listens...” If the old fool couldn't be bothered to worry about the family finances, the boy figured it wasn't his job to do so, and so his instruction continued.


Three seconds.


He was good. He could tell from the look on his instructor's faces from his first lesson, but he came to know it more and more as the years passed. He would listen as his teacher's droned on and on, obviously striving to justify their expense by making the simple appear complicated, all the while gnashing his teeth and pouting that they wouldn't just get on with it. He progressed rapidly, working with an instructor for only a month or two before they would invariably begin to struggle to prepare lessons, ultimately stuttering that they simply had no more to teach him. He flew with a raw instinct that bordered on unsettling. He could get to know a vessel in a moment, and when he flew, he flew in communion with his ship. He could feel the tiny protests in his sticks, and reverberating up his legs through the deckplate. He didn't make demands of his ship, he didn't need to. He would only need to suggest, to whisper with his hands what he needed her to do, and she would respond with unbridled enthusiasm in an effort to please him. There wasn't a ship he touched that he couldn't dance with in a way that he knew made pilots three times his age sick with envy. As he bored through instructors, each more expensive than the last, he developed a reputation and his father worked himself harder, taking on additional hours, then additional jobs to cover the costs. The cost boomed when the boy demanded that they begin to import instructors from off-world. It disgusted him to sit in the presence of Cardassians, and Breen, and once even a Human who nauseated him with his pinkness, but he had exhausted what the Ferengi teachers he could both find and afford could teach him. As his father toiled and began to waste away, the boy sneered at him, congratulating himself on finding a way to motivate the ugly old slug to lose some weight. He paused for just a moment to reconsider his estimation when the news came that the worthless fool had dropped dead at his night job, but even as his mother keened, he decided that he couldn't possibly bear responsibility and, even if he did, it wasn't really much of a loss.

Two. He reached for the command button that would drop them out of warp.

His mother remarried quickly. Not only had she held on to her looks, but she possessed, in quantity, the trait most attractive in any woman: a submissiveness born of naked desperation. His new stepfather had charmed the young pilot's mother effortlessly, but was only barely cordial to her son. The boy liked him immediately. He was tall, with good lobes and a style that spoke of a surplus of latinum. He didn't speak at great length of his business, only making vague hints about working in shipping for his brother. Whatever he did, it obviously paid well and left him plenty of time to spend wooing his new intended. Her announcement of their wedding, some time before the end of the traditional period of mourning, had surprised her son, and he had chastised her harshly in private for failing in her womanly duties. Ultimately however, the wedding went forward and there was a surprising lack of chatter about her breach of etiquette. What few whispers there were, he noticed, tended to be accompanied by hasty whispers and furtive glances over shoulders.


He hadn't considered what that could mean – what that should have told him about his new stepfather – because he was absorbed in his lessons and his daydreams; not until his new stepfather came to him after the wedding. He had explained with a cool smile that he was aware of the boy's reaction to the wedding announcement and that he had different views on the boy's impertinence than his mother's previous husband. To demonstrate, he had proceeded to beat the boy violently with a heavy length of wood. He was no longer smiling when he did so, but neither did he seem particularly angry either. He had delivered a workmanlike pulverizing and, when he was finished, he laid out how things would proceed forward. As he wiped away his stepson's blood from his cudgel, the older Ferengi explained that the boy would be taking on a position in the new family business. He'd be reporting directly to his new uncle, a Ferengi not as disposed as kindly to impudence, he was advised, and would be responsible for ferrying completely legitimate, legal, above board cargo that he must never look at, speak about, or let fall into the hands of any planetary customs agents. While he wasn't enthused about the thrashing he'd taken, the pilot could barely restrain his eagerness as he agreed to the non-negotiable proposal. A position as a navigator aboard a smuggling freighter meant learning to fly a warp-capable vessel. He could feel himself salivating as he thought of it.

One. His hand hovered low, twitching in eagerness to snap the ship out of theoretical space and back into reality.


If he had liked his stepfather, it would be fair to say that he adored his new uncle from the outset. He was called Riss and he was the best kind of legitimate businessman: intelligent, greedy, successful, and, best of all, diversified. His initial ventures had paid out so handsomely that he'd actually managed to acquire several wholly legal businesses in addition. Of course, he had the business acumen to bring each of them closer to ethically questionable, and highly lucrative, gray areas. He'd taken controlling shares of several manufacturing and construction enterprises, a distribution warehouse for lobe enhancing pharmaceuticals, and even a luxury resort on some far flung moon. But he still made an annual fortune on his semi-legal and blatantly-not shipping, and it was there where the boy had truly discovered himself.


Warp flight had, as he'd known it would, come as naturally to him as the rest of space travel. He could intuit from his first days that shifting vagaries of a warp field – how to settle into its protection, how to nurture it, how to securely maintain its fragile cocoon even as he routinely drove engines harder than their manufacturers had even intended. The ships were just as eager to please him in warp space as they were while drifting in-system. None of that surprised him. What he hadn't fully expected, if only because he hadn't considered it before, was his natural aptitude for navigation as well. He had a knack for visualizing impossibly large areas of space, complete with the astrological hazards within, and finding short, cost-saving routes discretely around burdensome patrol ships and blockades around embargoed planets. He earned regular praise from his uncle, the occasional beating to remind him of his place, and more money than his father had earned annually after just his third haul. He transitioned from a boy to a young man with fine clothes on his back, latinum in his pockets, and bright hopes for his future.


The timer hit zero and he twitched towards the switch the would disengage the warp drive, but something in his gut demanded he hesitate. Behind him, there came an ugly squawk from the direction of the captain's chair, but he ignored it and listened instead to what the Annabelle's Lament was telling him.


*Not yet...*


He'd been enthused when his uncle had first come to him and explained that he'd be taking on a new kind of work. Riss was exploring the idea of personnel contracting – hiring out some of his skilled operators to other entrepreneurs who needed reliable talent in exchange for lucrative percentages of their operations – and his nephew was to be, despite the unfortunate pun, a “pilot program.” The pay, which he'd been assured would constitute a significant increase over his previous earnings, had blinded him to other considerations. On his first excursion he'd been forced to ferry a shuttleload of Bajoran girls from the planet where they'd been...recruited...to the moon where they'd be sufficiently trained for new careers in the comfort industry. The incessant wailing and the stink of them had only been trumped in awfulness by the notion of taking orders from the Bajoran captain. The disgusting old man had the audacity to issue orders as if he was the pilot's superior and not obviously some mistake of misguided evolution. Worse, Riss had made it clear that he was expected to obey the orders given to him by this alien monstrosity or he would face his uncle's displeasure. So he had done as ordered, and the ship had avoided any time-wasting entanglements with the authorities, and even after all that, the Bajoran captain had the temerity to respond to his pilot's unflinching but honest critique of his command skills (as a natural extension of his species' inferiority) in a manner that had displeased his uncle when the young Ferengi had informed him. The Bajoran captain had been dragged into an audience with Riss on shaky knees that functioned much less poorly at the end of the meeting, but he'd lived. The same could not be said for the ship's doctor on the Klingon cargo transport the pilot was assigned to next. He'd been angered to the point of leaving bruises on Riss' employee, and what Riss did to him spread the word sufficiently in the underground circles that the pilot was not to be touched. His third voyage, under a Cardassian gun runner had gone smoothly, though the stink of the Cardies kept him up at night.


Now, was the worst assignment of all. Not just a human, but a human FEMALE. When he heard the news, he'd dared to stare at Riss with his jaw agape. The older Ferengi had cuffed him hard about the ear and barked that the young navigator's face would get him into trouble. Then, Riss had explained that Cassidy Rainner, human female captain of the Annabelle's Lament, had taken on a job that required a pilot. Not just any pilot, said she, but the best in the Ferengi's entire operation. Amused, Riss had quoted her a ridiculous price, which she had agreed to almost without haggling. He explained to his nephew that she'd agreed so readily that she was either fool enough to consider skipping on Riss' payment, or that she'd be making enough to justify the exorbitant sum. Human female or no, Riss had advised, she didn't have a reputation for being stupid, and that left only the latter possibility. She was obviously onto something BIG and Riss wanted a piece.


The squawk came from behind him again, but he barely noticed. Both his lungs and the chronometer said they were nearly a half-second past their planned drop point. The woman who presumed to call herself a captain was daring to question him, but he ignored her and withdrew to a place inside himself where there was only the whine of the Annabelle's Lament and his picture of the space they were lancing across.


*NOW!*


With a hiss, he slammed his fingers onto the command console and space shuddered around them. In front of them, looming impossibly before them large like an angry god, was the plasma manifold exhaust port on the starboard nacelle of the Federation hospital ship, USS JENNER.


He whooped in exultation.


“Crichton, Shields!”


“Way ahead of you!”


“Is the cloak holding?


He did his best to ignore the ugly, grating sound of their voices and focus instead on the sight before him. They were only kilometers from the nacelle, surrounded on all sides by the Federation armada. If he'd dropped out of warp when the timer demanded, they'd have been too far from the fleet. Trying to maneuver in on thrusters, even under cloak, would almost certainly have betrayed them to the Starfleet sensors and scuttled the entire operation. He'd done it. That alone was enough to justify what he'd be paid on this mission, and he was sure it would be a story people would tell each other for years to come.


“Brass! Is the cloak holding,” Rainner demanded him.


He turned over his shoulder. “Of course, it is. Can you not see for yourself?” His spit his words between his pointy, crooked teeth.


Rainner bit off her reply and turned to her Bolian first officer. “Evaer. Get the tractor lock.”


The Bolian twisted up his puffy blue face and huffed. “Almost...no-Got it!”


There was a shudder as the Annabelle's Lament adhered herself to the JENNER.


Cassidy scowled. “Do you think they felt that?”


Brass snorted. “Probably. The blue idiot fumbled the tractor beam.”


“Shut up, Brass! Crichton, any sign they see us?”


The one-eyed engineer examined his screen. “Hen house looks quiet.”


Rainner sighed heavily, and then nodded. “Okay. Good, then. Evaer, you're with me. Crichton, get ready to drop those shields, but get them up as soon as we're away.”


“On it.”


“And be ready on the switch to bring us back. I don't want to be left standing over there with our dick in our hands.”


Crichton fixed his remaining eye on the captain and shrugged. “Well, I'll sure try. But it can be tough maintaining a lock over so far a distance...”


Cassidy whipped across with her left hand, from where he had no peripheral vision to warn him the blow was coming, and left her hand print on his face. “Can it.”


For a moment, a dark furious cloud floated over Crichton's features, but he swallowed it down. “Ready to go ma'am,” he said flatly.


“Drop the shields and beam us over.” Crichton keyed a short series of commands into his console, and in a flash of light the captain and first officer of the Annabelle's Lament vanished.


“You allow her to strike you? A female,” Brass demanded incredulously.


Crichton rubbed his jaw. “Comes with the territory, kid. You better learn that or she's liable to give you a taste yourself, especially if you keep mouthing off to her.”


“She wouldn't dare.”


“Oh yeah, you figure she's afraid of you?”


“The terms of her contract with my uncle mean that I must go along with the farce of her pretending to be a starship captain, but I would allow no woman, certainly no Hoo-man woman to ever show such disrespect. You've invited this by allowing them clothes. If she were to forget her place with me, I would remind her of it.”


“Oh yeah,” Crichton asked, a mean-spirited smile spreading across his face. “Because you're such an imposing specimen.”

Brass bristled, taking the engineer's meaning immediately. Genetically, Ferengi tended either towards corpulence or a stature that suggested emaciation, and Brass was squarely in the latter category. Among Ferengi, he was dashingly tall, but he barely stood an inch over the golden-headed female who tended to orbit the captain. He didn't know why the smaller female stayed so close to the bigger one. The best explanation he could think of was that she was a purchased servant, eager to be close at hand to serve her mistress. He was pleasantly surprised to see a human female so eager to fulfill her duties and the thought of the compliant female called Trixie caused a confusing flush within him. Ignoring it, he refocused his attention on the engineer. “Specimen enough to correct a wayward female. You only doubt me because you've been cowed by her yourself. I am not some weak Hoo-man, reeking of alcohol and with my face covered in mold.


With a momentarily confused blink, Crichton touched the beard on his chin. “Maybe not. But if you decide to try her, do us all a favor and make sure we're all here to see it. Personally, I'd love to watch her mop the deck with your face.”


“Especially the way she's raggin' right now,” interjected Goldstadt, the excuse for a doctor who looked as if his entire body had succumbed to the creeping mold on the engineer's face. He looked to the Ferengi's less-than-expert opinion like a different offshoot of evolution than most Humans. Brass scowled around his gnarled teeth and wondered again what the value was in bringing along a physician, especially one with such an obviously casual familiarity with hygiene.

“You think so,” Crichton asked.

“The way she's prowling around here. Definitely.”

Brass was confused. “What is raggin'?”


Goldstadt laughed, a single meaty bark, deepening the navigator's anger. “You don't know?”

“He's just a boy,” Crichton interjected, drawing out the last word. “Probably ain't even been with a woman. Least not one old enough to bleed.”


“Not one of your foul Hoo-man whores,” he spat.

“You know, 'riding the rag?' 'Crimson tide?' 'Monthly visit from Aunt Flo,'” Goldstadt was chortling now, a high pitched ugly sound. Brass only looked at him, openly mystified now. So Goldstadt set about explaining his meaning, in such an explicit manner as could only be managed by an individual possessed of an abundance of medical training and an utter lack of tact or decency. His explanation involved a lot of grandiose hand gestures and sound effects he made with his mouth. As he tried to finish his explanation over his own laughter at the Ferengi's shocked expression, Brass said the only thing he could.


“Disgusting.”


=[/\]=


SCENE: Crew Bunks

TIME INDEX: Later. Now.


Brass had been at his bunk when the Annabelle's Lament had warped away from the Federation fleet, reading yet again the coded instructions his uncle had given him. He read the seemingly innocuous, if absurd, letter again and again, ignoring the second paragraph and moping over the first.


[[Good cousin. Great news! I finally came to a decision regarding the sixty two place settings we discussed. I've taken the beggar woman's advice because hearing it thirty-five times was enough. Though she is fully ninety-four years old, she has made fifty-seven profitable suggestions, and I trust that any who cross her would heed her words sixteen times, for there is profit in manners, even if costs a Ferengi his last thirty-three bars.]]


To Brass, the meaning was clear. 'Good cousin,' meant he was on the job. 'Cousin' meant 'employee' in -Riss' lingo. The items mentioned were irrelevant, it was the numbers that conveyed his uncle's meaning, each of them tied to one of the Rules.


Sixty two. 'The riskier the road, the greater the profit.' This would be a dangerous assignment, more dangerous than typical.


Thirty-five. 'Peace is good for business.' Riss had something, knew something, or suspected something that told him this mission might lead to more lucrative ventures down the line.


Ninety-four. 'Females and finances don't mix.' But that was countered against fifty-seven, 'Good customers are as rare as latinum. Treasure them.' This was where it all started to go sour for Brass, the first time he read the letter and now as he read it again for the who-knows-how-many time? Working for a female. A human female. And now that he knew about what they...did...it was even more so.


Sixteen. 'A deal is a deal.' Riss was letting him know, in no uncertain terms, that he would be expected to follow orders. Certainly his uncle wouldn't suffer retribution on him for expressing his educated opinions, but if Brass failed to follow orders, he'd be afforded no such protection.


He sighed as he reread the final phrase. Thirty-three. 'It never hurts to suck up to the boss.'


Suddenly, the alert klaxon warbled. He jumped to his feet, certain that in his brief rest period, the idiot Bolian had managed to steer them into an asteroid field. He scrambled towards the hatch leading to the bridge, cursing his luck and the mongrel horde he was surrounded by.


=[/\]=


SCENE: BRIDGE


He arrived on the bridge at the same time Rainner did, each hustling at double time. The smaller one, Trixie, followed close on her heels. Brass spared a brief instant to look at her soft features before his instincts for survival reasserted themselves. His eyes scanned the bridge. The Bolian was at the helm, looking around stupid and slack jawed. If he was the cause of the alarm, he was blissfully unaware of it. But given his cattle-like intellect, that didn't comfort Brass much. His eyes settled on Crichton, who was looking at Rainner with a look made up of equal parts scorn, amusement, and terror. “Glad you could make it, Cap'n.”


“What the hell's going on,” Rainner demanded, adjusting her clothing.


“Got something you need to see,” Crichton declared in a flat tone.


“So you trigger the alert,” Evaer demanded, trying to look authoritative and, obviously, failing.


Crichton didn't even spare him a glance. “Got something you need to see right now.”


Rainner sneered at him. “So here I am.”


Crichton winked at her – or maybe, he simply blinked, Brass couldn't be sure – and brought up an image on the Annabelle's Lament viewer.


It was a quiet star field vista, unremarkable and empty. “What am I looking at, Crichton,” Cassidy questioned, her tone suggesting that her amusement was wearing thinner.


“Wait for it.” Crichton tapped a series of commands into his console, and suddenly the image of the star field was marred by a series of translucent, roughly spherical purple shapes spiraling into the distance.


“What is that,” Trixie asked.


“That, pretty little thing, is us. As in, that's our wake. Our *irradiated* wake, and don't you just know it goes all the way back to where we found that fleet.”


Cassidy's jaw dropped. They were leaving a trail that would bring Starfleet crashing down on top of them. “The shields,” she said, and she hated how weak her own voice sounded. She demanded that she not make that sound again and leveled her stare at her engineer.


“Those metaphasic shields-”


“-did exactly what they were supposed to,” he bellowed over her. “Or you wouldn't be here.”


“Then what happened,” Cassidy hissed.


“Isn't it obvious? We were too close when we dropped the shields. You irradiated the hull.”


“The shields were only down for an instant!”


“How long do you think it takes to irradiate something in a waterfall of venting plasma?”


The captain of the Annabelle's Lament took a step towards the viewer, as if getting closer would let her see a way through the shitstorm before her. “How did you find this?”


Crichton shrugged. “I got bored. Started playing with the sensors in different phases, seeing if I could figure a way to increase range. Instead, I found that.”


“Do you think-” Damn it! There it was again. The sound of fear. She willed it away. “What are the odds the Federation finds it?”


“Depends on if they've got anyone smart enough to look for it.”


“You think they do?”


“Well...they've got me, so....”


“Shit. Shit!” Cassidy Rainner began to pace.


The navigator's face split in a hateful smile. “This is what comes.”


Rainner spun on Brass. “You little toad! You did this!”


The Ferengi was incensed. “I did not!”


“Take over for Evaer!”


“It's not my fault,” Brass insisted, standing his ground.


“You got us too close,” Rainner barked.


“I followed your orders, foolish as they were!”


“Watch your tone, Ears.” Cassidy's voice was taking on a low and dangerous rumble.


“Why should I? Are you going to begin to weep? Can you not restrain your elevated female hormones because of the rag you ride?”


“You better-” Cassidy blinked. “What?”


“I know that you are in your period, and that it has addled you.”


“She's really not,” Trixie said with an impish grin, but no one paid her any mind.


Rainner looked like she couldn't decide if the Ferengi was joking or not. Not that she appreciated the joke if he was... “You wanna run that by me again, asshole?”


“I could scarcely believe what Goldstadt and Crichton told me about how your repugnant Hoo-man menstruation rituals affected your ability to think and reason, but now I see they were overly conservative in their estimation of the weakness of your sex. You have damned us all with your lobeless sloppiness! All because you were too old an unappealing to dupe a man into breeding you for yet another cycle.”


She crossed the distance between them in a blink, and her arm was cocked to backhand his lumpy face back to Ferenginar when two things stopped her. The first was the way he hunched, along with the terrified squeak that escaped him as he flinched. The second was the whispered account she'd heard of the Klingon doctor. She didn't need to start heaping trouble on herself, especially now. Not when they were so close. She glanced over at Trixie, as if for solace, and then back at the Ferengi, letting her hand fall. “Your uncle says 'don't touch,' as long as you follow orders. Well, I am *ordering* you to relieve Evaer and take your post, otherwise you're fair game.”


Brass tried, just for an instant, to kill her with his gaze, and when that failed he took the chair the Bolian was vacating. Behind him, Rainner and her ExO huddled around Crichton.


“What do we do,” Evaer asked?


“Can we...get rid of it,” the captain asked.


“Only three ways I know of. Stop somewhere and get it scrubbed. Wait for the half-life to run out, or fly ourselves through the corona of a sun and try to overlay it with solar rads. Of course, being as that would pretty much certainly kill us, I think we should avoid it.”


“We need to change course, then,” the Bolian said, almost in a shout. “Otherwise we'll lead them directly to-”


Cassidy cut him off. “No. If they're not on our trail, then we just lose time. If they are, they can follow us wherever we go, and if we don't make this drop, they sure as hell won't be the only ones after us.”


“Or the scariest,” Evaer countered.


“Or the scariest,” she agreed.


“So what do we do?”


Brass stewed at the navigation console, listening to them squawk. The Hoo-man female hadn't struck him, but she'd humiliated him. She'd humiliated him in front of Trixie. All at once, he banished that thought from his mind and pretended it had never existed. As if he could possibly care about the esteem of a Hoo-man.


But as he forced that anger away, he was surprised to find another thought waiting underneath. He hadn't expected it and was surprised to find it there, but regardless, it was a comfort to him.


He found himself visualizing the second paragraph of Riss' instruction letter.


[[I implore you to remember your seven brothers and sisters, though I know I've done so forty-eight times before. After all, cousin, as everyone know, seventeen is greater than sixteen.]]


Seven. 'Keep your ears open and your eyes on the mark.'


Forty-eight. 'The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife.'


Seventeen. 'A contract is a contract is a contract...but only among Ferengi.'


A ghastly smile split his face. For all the tribulation he had to endure, he had taken a liking to the Annabelle's Lament. She whispered at him in a way she liked. All she really needed was a captain...a real captain...that could help her realize what a profit she could turn. And a captain could fly his own ship, couldn't he?


Of course, he could...


Behind him, the conference between Rainner, Evaer, and Crichton continued, but Brass tuned it out. He would fly the ship where he was ordered, and then what happened...would happen. Talking about it like they were doing was just so much wind.


But a wise man can hear profit on the wind.



=[/\]=


NRPG: Introducing Brass! He's a helluva guy. And now our motley band is complete! And they might not be as unready for us as we thought...


Dale I. Rasmussen

~writing most days for~

Lt. James Prophecy Barton

Sec/Tac USS PHOENIX


But today for...


Brass
Navigator/Pilot of the Annabelle's Lament