“I can hack into any system,” the woman assured him.

“Good. The rod will give you more detail. There are specific data files on the institute’s computer, and the data in question must be irreparably corrupted. No one can access it ever again. I assume that will not be a problem?”

The woman almost looked amused, which Daul took to be an affirmative reply.

The man raised his eyebrows. “That bad, is it?” he remarked.

Daul thought of the system Mora Pol would soon be implementing, thought of the cold, hard smile of Kalisi Reyar. “You’ve no idea,” he said.

20

Ro was not immediately as adept at handling Bis’s warp shuttle as she had hoped. She wasn’t certain if she could successfully land the vessel, but the other alternative was to transport herself down to the surface of the gas giant’s lonely moon, with the expectation that she would have to transport herself back up when her task was completed. The prospect was a bit frightening, as she had never handled a transporter on her own, but she decided it was necessary. She could not afford to damage her vessel; warp ships were few and far between for Bajorans, after all.

With a brief recollection of the encouragement Bis had whispered before kissing her good-bye, Ro beamed herself directly to the moon’s surface near a cluster of life signs that she knew to be the tavern where she was to meet her mark. Her molecules having satisfactorily reassembled themselves, she squared her shoulders and entered the little building, advising herself not to come off like an inexperienced, gawking young girl; she had long heard tales of the Orion Syndicate, whose henchmen would kidnap women to be sold as slaves. They sounded no worse than the Cardassians to Ro, but she still wasn’t about to take any chances.

Still, she found it difficult not to stare at some of the people she encountered inside the dimly lit bar—people with brightly colored clothing, not to mention their skin and hair; people with appendages that seemed too long or too short; people with extra sensory equipment, or in some cases, not quite enough; people whose faces looked too smooth, or too lumpy. Ro had never dreamed there were so many different types of people in the galaxy. She knew there were more than just Bajorans and Cardassians, of course, but to be confronted with the reality of it was dizzying. While Bajor struggled, day after day, year after year, the rest of the universe continued to move, everyone carrying on with his or her own business, unaffected by what happened in the B’hava’el system.

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.