Tourist Visa (Pt1)

Posted on Thu Mar 1st, 2018 @ 3:05am by Captain Remas McDonald

2,255 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: S0:1: What Is Past, Is Prologue
Location: Harlands World, Outside Federation Space
Timeline: 6 years before Project Long Jump.

If Harlands World ever got around to having a meaningful tourist industry, that did not cater to the criminal classes, it’s slogan might be ‘At Least It Doesn’t Rain All The Time’. Sure they would have lost the Ferengi clients, but most of them only used Harland's Worlds as a flag of convenience for their ships.

If you wanted papers for a ship that wasn’t wholly yours, or businesses willing to launder goods and credits through reasonably priced front companies, you came to Harland's World. No crime was too small, no graft to unseemly for the local security force to overlook for a cut. On Harlands World there were no laws, only cops.

Just far enough from Federation space to be convenient for citizens of utopia to come and achieve some safe, possibly mildly dangerous crime without consequences, it was a blemish on the Alpha Quadrant. A hive of scum and villainy the likes of which Starfleet would have liked to expunge from the galaxy with industrial quantities of antimatter warheads.

Not that Lieutenant Remas McDonald, on leave and out of uniform, was here to fulfil that particular Starfleet battle plan. He walked the crowded tropically hot streets in the attire of the Rish, a much-bepatched jumpsuit whose base material had been lost amid the riot of colours and materials. A collection of banded strips of cloth were tied around his right arm, each strip traditionally signifying ten light years of travels.

Remas would have to admit his own tallied a hundred per, but it was traditional. Much like the sword at his hip, as heavy a weight hanging from his belt as the day he’d been handed it. Maybe not as fancy as a phaser pistol, or a Marine mag rifle, but it had the prestige of being a magic sword. And that was powerful all by itself.

He stepped around a knot of Carcosain merchant spacers whose four joined arms were clutching at each other for support, as they drunkenly swayed their way to the next watering hole across the street. The air was thick with the scent of unprocessed sewage, mixed with the overly spiced scents of cooking oils from street vendors who might have been selling the same. No one paid him any mind, save that some turned credit pouches aside. After all, everyone knew that the Rish had light fingers and big eyes. Much in the way everyone knew Klingons ate the infants of their defeated enemies, and Vulcans got high on the smell of old paperback books.

Everyone knew it was a fiction, but still…

Remas lightly vaulted an enterprising puddle of some industrial runoff and made his way off the main drag and into a side street. Here the sickly yellow light from a polluted sky cast sepia shadows on everything, changing the crumpled heap of sleeping drunks behind a dumpster into just another set of trash bags. He passed them by, saw the sign flickering with a faulty holo-emitter, and made his way quickly to the grimy storefront.

“Welcome to Haricks Barter And Trade! Best Used Salvage This Side Of The Delphic Expanse!”

Somehow the little door announcer was able to install capital letters into all the words that wormed into Remas’s ear as he stepped in. If anything the crowded store's single room was oppressively hot, even compared with the runaway greenhouse effect that Harlands World prided itself on. Remas was suddenly grateful for the loose fitting jumpsuit he wore, as he doubted even Starfleet’s miracle fabric designers could have done anything to save him from heatstroke.

“I’ll be out in a minute!” A gruff voice boomed from somewhere in the back. “Don’t touch ANYTHING!”

Remas smiled and settled in to do as instructed knowing Harick had enough holocams installed in his shop to ensure he could see if Remas’s little toe broke his rule. Instead, he looked around, seeing racks of spent phaser emitters piled next to very well used antimatter injectors from a dozen different species. Given the corrosion, on some of the injectors, Remas had to imagine they'd been salvaged from wrecks of starships, maybe even from battlefields.

“Right, welcome to my shop, what can I-...Remas!”

Gul Harick, formerly of the Cardassian Central Command and 4th Order, stepped out from the back of his shop and strode over to Remas and clapped his big grey mitts on his shoulders. He bellowed a laugh, pulling the human into a hug. The old Cardassian’s hair was a little longer, a braid dropping down in front of the left ear, but he was still recognisable form the last time Remas had seen him. But there he was, the man who had shown a much younger Remas the true value of what others threw away.

“Good to see you too Uncle!” Remas laughed, returning the hug just as powerfully before breaking away to appraise him. “You look well.”

“As do you,” Harick commented, waving a hand to indicate Remas’s choice of attire. “I assume you’re dressing to blend in here? Or do I get to see the pleasure of you and your father in my shop in the future? If he’s here now I have a bottle of kanar fresh from the homeland, and some of that disgusting sink water you pink skins enjoy.”

“Here on my own business. Fancied returning to service with both my kidneys safely where I have them, which would not be the case if I was in my standard greys and reds,” he smiled back at Harick. “And how are you and girls?”

Harick scoffed with a roll of his eyes and waved Remas towards the back.

“Mala is going to send me to the poor house one of these days. Why she couldn’t choose to go to a reasonably priced learning establishment is beyond me. But the Vulcan Science Academy is the place to be if you’re a brilliant mind, and my Mala is. She’ll make a legacy of herself one day, you mark my words. As for Uta?” Harick pushed aside a bead curtain and retreated into the further oppressive heat of the back of the shop. A combination storage, workshop and kitchen area, open flames and cutting torches added to the heat. Remas had tried to describe Harick’s apparent kinship with Hephaestus once or twice to the Cardassian, but something always got lost in translation.

“Uta is out at the moment. A Harmasian merchant arrived this morning and thought it best to dicker over the price of the salvage I paid him to tranship,” Harick walked to a cooling unit in the corner, opened it and pulled out two tall bottles from within. “I thought it best that, given the Harmasian had given me grief, I gave them Uta. She could sell snow to a Breen if I gave her a chance, so this is my way of ensuring she uses her powers for good and not evil. She'll probably end up convincing the little squids to pay me.”

Remas smiled and took a chair that was offered as Harick poured the drinks. You’d not think it to look, but Harick’s girls had been much the talk and speculation of his youth in his father's homesteader. Of course, his mother had been less than enthusiastic about the thought of Mala coming on board, what with an Orion females pheromones keeping half the homesteader’s population up all night with various ill thought notions. Now Uta, in his mother's opinion, had been the safer choice. If only because Vulcans would not mess around with the life support systems that were her domain.

“To your wayward daughters Harick: might one make you honest, and the other make you rich,” Remas said by way of toast, raising his glass of...something. It smelt like whisky but had a subtle fungal aftertaste. Wasn’t actually all that bad. Harick, on the other hand, took a slug of kanar, the tar-like fluid favoured by Cardassians a little too on the toxic side for his human pallet.

“Huum…” Harick said pleasantly, drumming the fingers of one hand against his chest. He chuckled pleasantly and settled into the seat opposite the junk-strewn table. “Why do I get the feeling you’re not here to talk about old times or my daughters?”

“I dunno might just be I wanted to see an old friend,” Remas admonished, leaning forward to refill his glass. As he did so he smiled. “Though…”

“Ah, here it comes.”

“Though,” he said again, leaning back in his seat. “I had heard you’d come into possession of something unique. One of your off the book special items that no one is meant to know about, save those with an eye for such things.”

“Mind if I ask where you heard this vicious and much-maligned rumour from?” Harick asked mildly, his fingers now tapping the side of his glass.

“Oh you know us Rish, we’re people people. Or person people, I think. Phrase sorta got away from me a bit there. But we make friends, its one of the great reasons we’re asked not to land near towns when we make planetfall. Least we fly away with half the young eligible folk, or make the farm critters curdle the milk or some such,” Remas smiled, leaning across the table. “Diplomatic Corp got wind that the Bajoran government had found another one of their old solar sail ships from back in their glory days. Thing had been picked clean of all valuables and useful materials. Recently, so they determined. One of the purple shirts manning the colate desk there got word to me that, if I knew someone who knew someone in the line of business where ship parts get traded for coin and favour…”

Harick said something uncouth in Harmasian, which for a Cardassian lacking the front mouth tendrils was a feat of linguistic agility.

“Let me guess. Assured exclusivity? It’ll never get back to you?” Remas enquired.

“It did sound a little too good to be true,” Harick said after a moment, deflating a little.

“How much?”

“7 square kilometres of Bajoran solar silk, plus the usual religious idolatry they strapped to their ships to ward off bad omens,” Harick spat, swearing again in a language Remas wasn’t sure he could pinpoint. “It was going to turn me a tidy profit too. Had a representative from the Black Nagus himself coming to view it for a valuation.”

“Still going to make you a profit,” Remas said, reaching into one of the many pockets that dotted his jump suit, and pulled out a large flask that just about fit in his stretched out hands. He then offered it to Harick. “750 millilitres of pure latnum. Refined, not replicated. That’s payment enough for finding and storing it, and should cover payout for any inconveniences.”

“And...I stress this as a hypothetical, who would I be accepting this very gracious gift from?” Harick said guardedly, eyeing the flask that contained a Nagus’s ransom. “The Bajoran government wouldn’t even light a match to set a Cardassian on fire if it cost them, and everyone knows the Rish do not spend fortunes on trinkets and status of Wormhole Aliens. You’re too busy keeping antique cobbled together spaceships flying, and and you make your own arts and crafts. But Starfleet?”

He pursed his lips.

“Starfleet money comes with strings, always with strings. Reminds me of getting paid when I was Gul,” Harick grumbled.

“Money’s my own. Got lucky on the tables at the casino by the spaceport, the one with the three-eyed Dabo girl,” Remas smiled. Placing the flask on the table. “I’m known for collecting rare pieces of early space exploration gear. Once traded a captains desk for the left landing strut of the first Bolian lunar lander. Its pride and joy of my collection that, and wouldn’t ya know it would look right grand draped in a floating shroud of Bajoran solar silk. Really tie the whole thing togethe.”

“7 square kilometres of the stuff?” Harick muttered, reaching out and pushing the flask back on one corner, looking it over.

“Was thinking of making a summer suit out of the stuff. Something airy and gauche with tails.”

“Huum…” the old man muttered, pushing the flask back towards Remas. “Would you grant me a day to think it over? I’m not just taking your credit to cover my costs, but the costs of having a very influential man's representative fly out to this hell hole to look over an empty warehouse. Cuts into the profits, which I need to keep this palace running. Cuts into my reputation as well."

“Sure, a day would be fine. Let me soak in a little of the local colour whilst you chinwag with Uta about this. But just know if I hadn’t volunteered for this, you’d have gotten a run in with a spook from Starfleet Intel’s Exterior Project branch. They are not fun people. They are the anti fun people, in point of fact. But you’re a friend, an old one. You don’t deserve that sort of trouble in your life uncle.” Remas took the flask of latnum, and slipped it back into his pocket. “So, I have an afternoon to kill.”

Harick smiled, leaned forward and took the bottle of mushroom whisky and poured another glass.

 

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