1
February 12, 2164
Verex III, Orion-Klingon Borderland
“. . . SO WE CAN ALL SEE the benefits to such an alliance,” intoned the burly Orion at the head of the meeting table, his gaze taking in each of his two guests in turn. “Working alone, the Vulcans were powerful enough to drive both of your organizations into retreat. Now they are part of a larger, even stronger Federation whose Starfleet patrols increasingly interfere with your efforts to stay in business. What better revenge,” the green-skinned man went on in a polished baritone, “than to form a partnership of our own to stand against them?”
“The benefits of allying with your . . . employers are self-evident, Harrad-Sar,” replied the Mazarite representative, Eldi Zankor. But then she sneered, the expression subtly stretching the scalloped flaps of skin that extended from her cheekbones to her ears. “But what can Jofirek here provide us? The Vulcans drove his syndicate from Agaron while I was still learning to walk, and he’s been struggling for relevance ever since!” Despite the white hair of her temples and eyebrows, a typical trait of her species, Zankor was in the prime of her life, her ambition and ruthlessness—and the government purge of her predecessors some years before—allowing her to rise to the head of Mazar’s crime syndicate at a precocious age.
The same could not be said for the wizened, silver-maned Agaron who sat across from her, the characteristic vertical ridge that bisected his people’s foreheads almost lost amid a sea of wrinkles. “How dare you!” he wheezed. “My smuggling and narcotics connections span two sectors!”
“Two or three systems in each sector, at best. Why would you even want this fossil in our alliance, Harrad-Sar? He’d just be a drag on us.”
“I’ve had forty years to rebuild my organization! Your group is still trying to pick up the pieces after the purge!”
Harrad-Sar spread his hands. “Please, please, my friends,” he said. “The Federation’s strength comes from its unity—its ability to set aside its members’ differences in pursuit of their mutual interests. Our respective syndicates will be better able to stand against them if we learn from their example. This joint venture can benefit from Jofirek’s experience, the connections and markers he’s accumulated over the decades, as well as from the fervor and resources of the Mazarite cartel.”
Watching through a pane of one-way glass from the next room, Navaar smiled at her slave’s performance. “He’s doing well,” the merchant princess purred, absently twirling a lock of her luxuriant black hair around a slender green finger.
“He always was a quick study,” replied her sister D’Nesh as a muscular male slave—bigger and younger than Harrad-Sar, with fewer and less elaborate metal adornments piercing his bare scalp—brushed her curly hair for her. “I guess you were right not to kill him after all.”
“I knew he had it in him to redeem himself for his failure.” In her private thoughts, Navaar admitted the truth: the failure to capture Jonathan Archer all those years ago, in retaliation for his disruption of the Orion Syndicate’s slave market on this very planet, had rested as much with herself and her sisters as with their chief slave. Not only had Archer’s officers somehow managed to overcome the Three Sisters’ powerful pheromonal control, but Earth and its allies had learned the truth about Orion women: that they, or at least their most pheromonally potent elite lineages, were the actual rulers of Orion civilization rather than the slaves they pretended to be. On top of everything else, the Starfleet crew had crippled the warp drive of Harrad-Sar’s ship and forced him and the Sisters to limp home at sublight; it had been nearly a year before their distress signals had reached another Orion ship, and the Sisters had spent much of that year punishing Harrad-Sar for his failure. D’Nesh had wanted to tear out all his piercings and keep tearing until there was nothing left but a pile of bones and organs. Maras would have been happy to watch and join in; the youngest Sister was a woman of simple pleasures.
But Navaar had recognized the truth: that they had simply been making Harrad-Sar the scapegoat for their own failure, driven by their fear of the consequences when they finally returned in disgrace. She had convinced her siblings that they would need to stick together more closely than ever to survive, to draw on their slaves’ loyalty to the fullest rather than discarding them and trying to start fresh. Harrad-Sar had recognized in turn—with a little persuasion from his owners—that his own best chances of survival had come from helping the Sisters survive, and if anything, it had been the bonds the four had formed during that long trek home that had enabled them to weather their disgrace, emerge stronger, and eventually rise to their current leadership roles in the Syndicate.