Sonya Gomez leaned against the wall of the turbolift, her arms crossed. She gently tapped the padd in her left hand against her chin.

Duffy had been the very model of efficiency, and had produced a detailed report, with full spectrographic analysis of Phug’s lifepod. Gomez had then reviewed the system diagnostics and had reluctantly agreed with the findings. It was Gomez’s task as first officer to present the results and conclusions to her captain. Unfortunately, the answers Duffy had obtained only posed more questions.

She sighed. Why did it have to be a Ferengi?

Gomez had to admit that her opinions of the trader race were inevitably colored by her experiences aboard the Enterprise. About a year before she signed on to the Federation’s flagship as an engineer, Captain Picard had the first visual contact with the Ferengi. Since then, the ship had been involved in many encounters with the race, and Gomez, who, working in engineering, was often involved in cleaning up the mess left by the latest Ferengi scheme against the crew, had developed an unhealthy distrust of the race. That distrust was fostered by the fact that the Ferengi were the ones who opened the first trade relations with the Dominion. Gomez had always wondered in the back of her head whether or not the war would have turned out the way it did if it had been the Federation that made first contact instead of the Ferengi.

Intellectually, she knew that her distrustful attitude was at odds with Starfleet’s all-embracing philosophy. She needed to get past it—especially today, dealing with Phug and his pod.

The turbolift eased to a halt, the doors slid open onto the bridge. Duffy was at the conn, and he smiled at her. “Ready to give the captain the bad news?” he asked, getting up from the command chair.

She nodded, and they both went into the ready room.

“Tell me you have good news, Gomez,” Gold said.

“I’m afraid not, sir. There’s no evidence of any damage at all. None of the particulate traces you’d expect from a warp core breach, minimal hull scarring, none of which matches what you’d get from an antimatter explosion, no radioactivity beyond the usual background radiation of space. And, before you ask, there’s no sign of distress from any kind of energy weapon—he wasn’t running from a firefight, either.”

“Or,” Duffy added, “if he was, he did it without getting hit once, which is pretty unlikely in a pod with only type-two maneuvering thrusters.”

Gold blew out a breath. “He was running from something. What would spook a Ferengi DaiMon that much?”

“Someone’s found a way of replicating latinum?” Duffy joked.

Indicating the padd’s screen, Gomez said, “One bit of good news—we know the course he took.”

“Good,” Gold said. “Any information about Phug or his ship?”

Gomez shook her head. “No, there wasn’t anything useful in the pod’s computer. I can’t imagine a Ferengi would put anything like that in an escape pod’s databank where anyone could access it without paying for the privilege.”

“Good point.”

Duffy rubbed his chin. “Might be worth putting a call in to Deep Space 9. See if our old pal Nog knows anything about Phug.”

Gomez remembered that Lieutenant Nog—the first Ferengi to ever join Starfleet and the chief operations officer of DS9—had worked with the da Vinci crew at Empok Nor a while back. Gomez herself hadn’t been around for that, busy as she was with a mission to Sarindar, but she did know one thing: Nog was the son of the new Grand Nagus, Rom. Rom himself was a former engineer on DS9—that was the time spent among humans that Phug had found so distasteful—and the architect of the brilliant self-replicating minefield that had held the Dominion in check for precious, valuable months while the Federation amassed its forces.

“Couldn’t hurt,” Gold said with a nod. “Have McAllan get in touch with Nog and have Wong backtrack Phug’s course. My curiosity’s been piqued now.”

“Mine, too,” Gomez said. “It’s not like Phug himself has been forthcoming.”

Within ten minutes, Wong had set a course back along the pod’s route and McAllan had sent a message to Deep Space 9.

Within fifteen minutes, the da Vinci was rocked by a gravity wave of some kind. “All stop!” Gomez said. “Captain Gold to the bridge.”

“Answering all stop,” Wong said.

“What the hell was that?” Gold said as he entered the bridge.

“Some kind of gravity wave,” Duffy said from an aft engineering station. “Something’s generating a massive field, but we’re not picking up anything except normal space.”

“Damage report,” Gomez said to McAllan as she vacated the command chair for Gold.

McAllan checked his status board. “No significant damage. A few bumps and bruises.”

“We’re picking something up now,” Duffy said. “Wow.”

Gomez joined Duffy at the console. “Could you be a little more specific?”

“Not really,” Duffy said. “Take a look.”

She looked at his console, and saw an amazing sight. “Wow,” she said. “Put it on the main viewer, Kieran.”

Everyone turned to the viewscreen, which now displayed a Ferengi Merchantman. A floating commerce vessel, it was a virtual city in space. Never a race to allow aesthetics to get in the way of practicalities, they had designed the Merchantman as an enormous version of their regular Ferengi vessels, but absurdly large—five decks where there was one on the original. It gleamed a tarnished gold, somehow brassy in the blackness of space. It was at once ludicrous and threatening.

Gold was actually open-mouthed. “How the hell did that thing appear out of nowhere?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Duffy said, “but it didn’t register on the sensors until we came within fifty thousand kilometers of it.”

“Try to hail them, McAllan,” Gold said.

“Aye, sir.”

Moving to stand next to the operations console, Gomez asked the Bajoran woman seated there, “Mar, what can you tell me about the ship?”

“Registry lists it as the Ferengi Merchantman Debenture of Triple-Lined Latinum,” Ina Mar said.

“That’s a mouthful,” Wong muttered with a smile.

Ina continued: “Three kilometers in diameter, crew capacity of thirty thousand, though I can’t get any definitive lifesigns right now. According to the database, it’s owned and operated by DaiMon Phug.”

Duffy grinned. “We have a winner.”

Gold turned to McAllan. “Where’s Phug now?”

“Emmett gave him a physical—he checked out fine. Corsi stuck him in the mess hall with two guards on him.”

Frowning, Gold repeated, “Emmett gave him a physical?”

“The DaiMon had a problem being examined by a ‘fee-male,’” Gomez said, impersonating the way Phug had sneered the word in sickbay.

Gold grumbled something, then said, “Put a call through to him. And keep trying to raise that monster out there.”

Phug’s high-pitched whine of a voice came on a moment later. “I demand an explanation for this disruption of my well-being!”

“This is Captain Gold. We were retracing your pod’s route. It took us right to your ship.”

“You found my ship?”

Gomez shot a glance at Gold. Phug had been indignant—now he was out-and-out scared.

“Get…us…out…of…here…now!”

Before Gold could reply, the ship shook again. “Report!” the captain bellowed.

“We’ve been caught in a tractor beam,” Duffy said.

“Break us loose,” Gold said to Wong.

Wong tried to activate the impulse engines, but the da Vinci didn’t move. “We can’t break free, Captain.”

“You fools!” came Phug’s voice—at once smug and scared. “You’ve doomed us all!”