Recipe for Success 2

 Ronnie

The planet's surface is wet and cold and squishy. Evolution appears to have got the local lifeforms up to the algae and lichen stage, and then given it up as a bad job. The Ferengi base is a clutter of prefab housing modules, laid down apparently at random in the shadow of four admittedly impressively-sized comms masts. All deserted, now, and some of the more enterprising lichens are trying to grow on it.

 Tallasa has a phaser in her hand; Saval has a tricorder, and is scanning. "I'm reading two life signs in the immediate vicinity," he says. "There is some interference from the comms antennae - I cannot be entirely sure of the details."

 "OK, fair enough," I say, and then I stop. "Wait. That means the comms masts must be powered up, right?"

 "Affirmative," says Saval.

 "So who did that, and why? Fan out," I say to the security team. "I think we need to get some more details." My own phaser is a comforting weight in my hand, now.

 My combadge bleeps for attention; I slap at it. "Yo."

 "Possible incoming," says Jhemyl's voice. "We had a brief sensor contact - looked like an Orion corvette decloaking to launch something, possibly a stealth shuttle. We're at yellow alert and commencing intensive scans now."

 "Terrific." This situation is not making much sense to me. Nagus thieves coming back for more? And why would you take souvenirs of a Grand Nagus to a miserable dump like this, anyway? "OK, gang," I say to the security team, "stay frosty, we may have company -"

 "Ah. There you are. Good, good. Well, come along, fix the antenna, then."

 The voice is thin and testy, and it's coming from a shambling figure who's just stepped around the corner of one of the prefabs. He doesn't seem remotely surprised to see us. Pink, bald, heavily wrinkled - Yridian, at a guess, and dressed in drab civilian clothes that hang loosely off his spare frame. "Come along, come along," he repeats.

 Another figure hoves into view. This one is shorter, with ears, lots and lots of ears. "What are you doing here?" demands DaiMon Nibb. "You're supposed to be half way across the quadrant by now!"

 "What?" says the Yridian. "No, no, no, I'm supposed to be right here, remember?"

 "Not you!" Nibb hisses. "You! I mean her!"

 "I don't see how any of this is getting that phase coupling fixed," the Yridian complains. "We need to get the antennae in exact phase alignment before we can recover the data. I did explain all this, I'm quite sure."

 "If anyone would like to explain things to me," I say, "I'm in the market for some explanations."

 Nibb heaves a heavy sigh. "Just help me fix the phase coupling," he says. He glares at the Yridian. "Once he's fixated on one idea, he never gives up on it. Over here, this way." He squelches off towards one of the big masts. I exchange glances with Saval and Tallasa. Nobody seems to have any better ideas, so we squelch off after him. The Yridian tuts loudly and vanishes into one of the prefabs.

 "Who is that guy?" I demand of Nibb.

 "Professor Tharious Mophel. Formerly of Beta Aurigae University. One of the best and brightest," Nibb says, instantly destroying my faith in Beta Aurigae University. "Here we are." He stoops down and opens an access panel at the base of the comms mast. Behind it is circuitry, of the kind I know as "someone in Engineering fix that, will you?" Saval, though, steps forward to inspect it.

 "So where's the crime scene?" I ask.

 Nibb just sighs again. "I'll explain everything later," he says, and points at something in the circuit block. Saval is doing things with his tricorder. I try a sigh of my own. It feels good.

 "Sir." One of the security team, apparently determined to earn his pay. "I've got perimeter contacts, bearing four seven, range seven fifty and closing."

 Whoever came on the stealthed shuttle, presumably. Bits of this situation are still not adding up.

 "Yes!" Nibb says, very loudly. "The coupling is in alignment! Finally!"

 "Well, thank you, Mr. Saval," I say. "I'm sure you've been very helpful, though I don't know how, yet. By the way, there seem to be a bunch of Orions coming towards us from a stealth shuttle, anyone got any views on that?"

 "What?" Nibb screams. And suddenly he's running for the prefabs, shouting "They've found us! They've found us! Download the data and go!"

 "You can't rush these things, you know," I hear Mophel say, faintly. Saval is switching things on his tricorder, now. I take a look around, picking out large solid objects I can hide behind.

 "Confirm Orion life signs," says Saval. "Energy signatures consistent with light hand weapons and personal shielding."

 "How many?" I trip my own personal shield, feel the staticky tingle as it comes on.

"Six." So we're not outnumbered, and they may or may not know we're here. Odds are... not as bad as I would have expected, although I'd prefer more of an edge. I hold to the old dictum that, if you're in a fair fight, you're already doing something wrong. "Set heavy stun and stay lively, guys," I say. Behind me, I can hear Nibb and Mophel arguing.

 I play the old head game of if I were the opposition, what would I do? Too much to hope that they don't know we're here.... If I were them, I'd split into pairs, one pair advancing while another lays down suppressing fire, swapping roles as they advance - while the third pair sneaks in and claims the prize, which must be Nibb or Mophel or both. I make a series of cryptic hand gestures at the security guys, then hunker down beneath the comms mast's foundations and pull my own little surprise out of my transporter buffer.

 Bolts of sick green light flash through the air with a nasty whining sound. Commercial grade disruptors, our personal shields can cope with a few hits from those... but only a few, so little Ronnie had best be careful... oh, stuff being careful, though, it's just not what I do.

 So I fiddle with my little souvenir, an antiproton rifle I took off a Voth shocktrooper who didn't want it any more. It's nearly as long as I am, and it rests nicely on the ferroconcrete base of the comms mast, and when next I see a bolt of green light flash in my direction, I point the business end of the rifle at its source and let fly with a prolonged volley of sizzling scarlet blasts. There is a noise, a sort of a yelp and a staticky crackle and then a cross between a splat and a thud. I think a lot of heavy stun just got through someone's personal shield and did what heavy stun does. I loose off another volley on general principles. Then I poke my head up and have a look around.

 There are two Orions lying spark out and face up in the mud. Chalk two up to little Ronnie, I think. There are other things going on, though. Saval and Tallasa are in a firefight with another pair of Orions. It doesn't last long - the Orions have standard disruptors, my guys have MACO phaser rifles, and very soon the Orions' shields make "made by the lowest bidder" noises and their owners fall down. Meanwhile, the security team either read my cryptic gestures correctly, or worked out a good tactical plan by themselves - either way, the last pair of Orions find themselves bracketed neatly in a crossfire of golden phaser light, and they are down and snoozing by the time I've wrestled the shocktrooper rifle around to point in their direction. I stand up.

 "Good job, team," I say cheerfully. "Wrap this lot up nicely for the cops, and let's be done with it."

 "What about -?" Tallasa jerks her head meaningfully at the prefab, from which I can still hear wrangling voices.

 "Let's go take a look." I flick the shocktrooper rifle back into my transporter buffer, straighten my uniform jacket in my best Jean-Luc Picard manner, and stride confidently towards the building.

Inside, there are several pieces of sciency-looking equipment, connected by a rats' nest of cables. Data is scrolling up various screens faster than I could read it even if I knew what it meant. Nibb is waving both hands in the air and yelling about urgency, and Mophel is fiddling with a sciency thing and yelling back about phase variances. And, on a table next to a sciency thing, I spot a stack of clear discs, about the size of the palm of my hand, containing a circle of coloured... stuff. A fetching shade of puce, I do declare.

 "Oh, look, evidence," I say, and pick up the stack of discs.

 Nibb gives one of those appalling Ferengi wails and comes at me, arms windmilling. Ferengi are stronger than they look, but so am I: I hold him off at arm's length with one hand, while keeping the discs firmly clutched in the other. Nibb falls back. "OK," I say, "let's be having some explanations, while I'm still in a relatively good mood, because if this day gets any worse, I am gonna be vexed with you pair."

 "I needed more pieces of Grent!" Nibb shouts.

 "Why?" I ask. "Are these eminently not-stolen pieces not enough?"

 "I needed to draw out the owners! If people thought Grent was valuable enough to steal, they might be inclined to sell!" And a Starfleet ship haring off after nonexistent Grent thieves would be publicity, I guess. But there's an obvious problem here -

 "But they'd sell at a high price, wouldn't they? Why are you bumping up the price of Grent, if you're buying Grent?"

 "I need the pieces! The full genetic data! The price doesn't matter! One must speculate to accumulate!"

 "What do you need the pieces for?"

 "Well, obviously," Mophel speaks up for the first time, "we need complete genetic data, as complete as we can make it, to reintegrate with the transporter signal."

 "What?"

 "Grent used these transporters!" Nibb shrills at me. "Before the base was shut down! And the records were preserved! We have his transporter signature! And Professor Mophel has a plan -"

 "Given the genetic data and the transporter logs," Mophel says, in a dead serious way, as if he really believes it, "my modified transporter-refabricator can reconstruct the original signal and regenerate it within an annular confinement beam. The signal may be degraded, true, but when integrated with the genetic data -"

 "We can bring him back!" Nibb interrupts. "Grent! The Grand Nagus! We can bring him back, and he will owe me! He will owe me his very life!" A rapturous expression appears on his narrow face as he adds, "Can you imagine how much that's worth?"

 Oh, boy.

 ---

 The Orions turn out not to know anything. This is pretty standard, for a hit team like this - an anonymous contact describes the job and the targets, they go in, they do the job - or in this case don't - and if they get caught, they don't know anything. I shuttle them off for processing at the nearest starbase - they will vanish into the Federation's criminal rehab system for a few years, and will probably come out as better people, if only because they're low-level Syndicate goons and pretty much anything's an improvement.

 I'd like to do much the same with Nibb and Mophel, but there's a problem there. It's a problem in Admiral's uniform and Science Division stripes, and it's on my screen right now. Admiral Philip Summerfield's eyes are shining like Nibb's were, but in his case it's the pure and virtuous light of Science, which is a lot harder to argue with.

 "Oh, undoubtedly there have been failures in the past," he says airily. "But Mophel's approach to the Heisenberg encoding problem is a genuinely novel one, and the Federation Science Council agrees with me that it needs to be followed up. Just imagine!" God save me from enthusiasts. "This could put an end to death itself! And it could let us bring back heroes of the Federation from times past! Imagine serving alongside the likes of Elizabeth Palmer, Geoffrey M'Benga or Kevin Riley! Admiral Grau, you must accord Professor Mophel and his - commercial sponsor - all the help they need. With the Science Council's authority, Admiral."

 "Yessir." Which is about all I can say, if he's got the Science Council's backing. Great. Summerfield cuts the channel with a pleased look on his face. I sigh and settle back in the command chair. "Bloody marvellous," I mutter. "Status?" I ask, louder.

 "We've brought Nibb's warp shuttle aboard," says Tallasa. "He and the Yridian are on it now - I'll get on to assigning them guest quarters. Do you want us to break orbit?"

 "Not until we've got a clear idea where we're going," I say. Xi Arietis IV isn't much, but at least it's quiet.

 Tallasa nods. "One thing, though, sir, we're getting multiple sensor pings. As if someone's doing stealth flights, scouting runs at the edge of the system. I think someone's still interested in our passengers."

 "Good for them. I wish I was. Saval." Saval looks up. "Remind me again. Mophel's gadget can't possibly work, can it?"

 "The holographic nature of transporter signatures...." I listen for a bit, then I zone out, because he's not telling me stuff I don't already know.

 People think, because replicator patterns and transporter patterns are both solid matter held as data streams, that they're the same thing. But they're not. Transporter signals play with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, using a weird trick that encodes and self-decodes the requisite data without ever acknowledging how it's done to the outside world. A side effect of this is that you can't read a transporter signal - copying it over to another medium just transfers the whole signal to that medium, leaving nothing meaningful behind. I once asked a science type, who couldn't get away in time, what would happen if you printed out a transporter signal and read it. He told me that, first off, there isn't that much paper in the universe, and secondly, if you did that, you would end up with several trillion sheets of random numbers, and you would then have a transporter signal in your head, which would probably be messy.

 Weird stuff can happen with transporters - often, it can be straightened out with transporters, since going over the same signal will sometimes make it self-repair, kind of thing. There are rare cases where signals have been duplicated - Jim Kirk told me a very fanciful tale once about it happening to him, and I believe him, because if anything seriously weird was ever going to happen, it would happen to Jim. And the tale of the Two Fat Rikers is pretty well documented, too.

 Some transporter research has panned out. Bio-filters, for instance, dropping any unknown nasties out of the signal before it gets encoded. Now that was a welcome change - I'm old enough to remember having to rub decontaminant gel on bits of crewmates I'd rather not touch. But, generally, back in my day, when someone tried to get creative with transporter signals, that was my cue to report down to the transporter room with a bucket and a mop, and there would be a closed-casket service later.

 Transporter logs do store stuff, true, but not anything useful. Mophel's idea is about as sensible, it seems to me, as trying to reconstruct Grent's personal correspondence from a study of his discarded envelopes. But what do I know?

 "The only good thing I can see about this," I say eventually, "is that Kevin Riley still owes me five credits...." A serious thought strikes me then. "Tallasa. You know interstellar law, right?"

 "Only enough to bail you out," my faithful exec replies.

 "Well, you know something. What's going to be the legal implications of this? Assuming it works - which I don't, but who listens to me? - what's the status of someone who's been resurrected by transporter? What happens to their will?"

 Tallasa's antennae twitch. "It'd vary a lot based on individual legal systems," she says cautiously. "I don't know if there's any sort of precedent - maybe people revived after long periods in cryosleep -"

 "Or people trapped in time warps for a long time," I break in. "Hell, you had it easy, believe me, the paperwork for my trips through the Rift would choke a hippopotamus." Tallasa was with me on the last trip, the somewhat-truncated one that took us only twenty-four years into the future. "Oh, boy. If someone's got a sniff of Nibb's idea, and they even think it might work... the only people who'd be happy about it are lawyers. He's planning to test this on Grent, right? What do we know about Grand Nagus Grent?"

 "Perfectly ordinary Ferengi businessman," says Jhemyl, promptly. "He made lots of money out of arms sales - gun-running to both sides in Tzenkethi border disputes - and parlayed it into a commanding position in the FCA. No great policy initiatives in his time as Grand Nagus, and he died at the age of a hundred and four in a freak oomox accident." She shivers. "Trust me, sir, you don't want the details on that."

 "No. No, I don't suppose I do...." I gaze moodily at the viewscreen. "Somewhere out there are Grent's heirs," I announce. "Who maybe will have to give back all or some of the money they've inherited, if Grent comes back into the picture. We are dealing, folks, with potentially bankrupt Ferengi. If you can think of anything better motivated or scarier than that, don't tell me, because I want to sleep tonight."

 "An interesting supposition, sir," says Saval, "but not valid unless DaiMon Nibb's plans are already generally known. The classification applied by Admiral Summerfield and the Science Council was need-to-know restricted. It is in the highest degree unlikely -"

 "The Science Council won't talk, because they'd worry about looking stupid," I say, "fair enough." I stand up. "I'm going to talk to Nibb. We know he knows what his own plans are, and I want to know what classification he's put on them."

 ---

 "Need to know only!" Nibb snarls at me. We've given him quite a decent suite of guest quarters; he seems to have settled in OK, with his stack of Grent secured inside a buzzing force field on the desk beside him. I'd have kept the damn things, myself, but protocol suggested I give them back.

 "All right," I say, "so who needs to know? Do you have investors, partners -?"

 "Share this wealth? Never! Do I look like a fool, hew-mon?" I don't answer that. "Only those with the most stringent need have been informed!"

 "So who's got a stringent need?" I ask.

 "Myself! And no others! I have not even trusted my family with this knowledge!"

 Well, I wouldn't trust his family either. "You're sure you've told no one else?"

 "Only those with an absolute need to know!"

 Sometimes I wish I was a Klingon, with an agony booth and a lot of sharp things handy. "Who would those be?"

 "Well," Nibb says, "obviously I had to ensure the idea and the process were protected."

 "Protected? Protected how?" I have a sinking feeling.

 "I registered appropriate patents and other notices of intellectual property with the FCA, naturally." Oh boy. "And I took further precautions! I applied for registration with the Federation Patent Office! With the Hall of Proprietary Knowledge on Qo'noS! With the provisional administration of the Romulan Republic - the Tzenkethi Intellectual Property Bureau - the Cardassian Union Patent Authority -"

 "Terrific," I say. "Nobody knows, except you and every patent authority in the galaxy."

 "Not just this galaxy! I rented time on the Midas Array and beamed a message to Andromeda! If the Kelvans ever do invade, at least my intellectual property rights will be respected!" Nibb is getting even more agitated. "But I transmitted details to the Borg Collective also, and received no reply! No acknowledgement, even! Those creatures are nothing better than Communists! Something should be done about them!"