They were all aliens on that planet. From the worlds of the Federation, the empires, and the nonaligned systems, each was a visitor on a planet where indigenous life had vanished in the slow expansion of its sun more than five hundred centuries before.

The scientists from a dozen races had come and gone since then. Andorians had sifted through the heat-stressed sands in search of clues to understanding and controlling their own prenova sun. Vulcans had beamed down a network of automated planetary sensors and warped out of system in less than one standard day. Terrans had conducted a six-month colony assessment study, with negative results. Even a Klingon heavy-assault scientific survey vessel had passed by, scanned for dilithium, and departed.

Through all these incursions, the planet spun on, unclaimed, unwanted, littered with the debris of sprawling survey camps and unbridled exploration. In the end, it was not even given a name and became little more than a footnote on navigation charts, identified only as TNC F3459-9-SF-50, its T'Lin's New Catalog number. It was an abandoned world, a dead world, and for some beings in that part of the galaxy, that meant it was perfect.

This time, his name would be Starn, and he would wear the blue tunic and burgundy guild cloak of a dealer in kevas and trillium. Legitimate traders were not unknown on TNC 50. The disguise would serve him well.

As he walked through the narrow streets of Town, Starn cataloged everything he saw, comparing it to the scanmap his ship had produced while in orbit, already planning his escape routes. The slender needles of Andorian prayer towers stretched up past the squat bubbles of Tellarite communal baths, casting dark shadows through billows of fine sand that swirled like vermilion fog. A group of Orion pirates appeared, wearing filters against the sand. There were no authorities on TNC 50 for pirates, or terrorists, or any type of criminal to fear. There was only one law here. Fortunately, Starn knew it.

The Orions slowed their pace, coolly assessing the resistance that a lone trader such as Starn might provide. Starn pulled on his cloak, stirring it as if the wind had caught it for an instant. The Orions picked up their pace, each touching a green finger to his temple in respect as they passed by. The sudden glimpse of the black-ribbed handle of Starn's Iopene Cutter had shown them that, like most beings on TNC 50, Starn was not what he seemed.

Starn continued unmolested. Most of the other oxygen breathers he passed also wore filters. A few, like Starn, did not. For those whose lungs had evolved in an atmosphere scorched by the relentless heat of 40 Eridani, this barren world was almost like coming home.

As Starn approached the center of Town, he felt a tingle and slight resistance as if he had stepped through a wall of unmoving wind. It was the transporter shield, projected and maintained by the merchants of Town. A strong enough transporter beam could force its way through, Starn knew, but the transmission time would be on the order of minutes, long enough to make an easy target of anyone trying a quick escape after an act of vengeance. Everyone who came to TNC 50 had enemies and Town could only continue to exist as long as it offered safe haven.

As the swollen red primary set, Starn approached his rendezvous site: a tavern pieced together from scavenged survey structures. A sign swung above its entrance, clattering in the rising wind. It told Starn who the proprietors of the tavern were. Other races might secretly whisper the name of the tavern, but only a Klingon would be insulting enough to display it in public.

The sign carried a two-dimensional image of a monstrously fat Vulcan clutching two Orion slave women to his folds of flesh. The Vulcan's face was distorted in a terrible grimace. Beneath the image, set in the angular pIqaD of Klinzhai, glowed the tavern's name: vulqangan Hagh. Starn pulled his cloak around him, an innocuous gesture that served to position the handle of his weapon for instant access, then stepped into the tavern to keep his appointment.

The central serving area was smoke-filled and dimly lit. For a moment, Starn was surprised to see a fire pit set in a far wall, blazing away. An open fire on a desert planet without plant life could only mean that that part of the tavern had come from either a Terran or a Tellarite structure. Starn studied the fire for a moment and failed to detect an appropriate amount of heat radiating from it. It was a holoprojection.

Terran, he decided. Tellarites would have shipped in plant material especially for burning. Starn knew the fire was there for a purpose, most probably to hide sensors. His host must already know that Starn had arrived.

Starn stepped up to an empty space at the serving counter. A multilegged creature made an elaborate show of sniffing the air, then moved several stools away. Starn ignored it.

The server behind the counter was, as Starn had deduced, a Klingon, and an old one at that. He limped on an improperly matched leg graft and wore a veteran's ruby honorstone in the empty socket of his left eye. Starn was troubled. A Klingon with an honorstone would be revered on Klinzhai, given line and land. A veteran with such a medal would never submit to being a menial tavern server, which meant the tavern server had stolen the honorstone. The concept of a Klingon without honor was as unsettling as the laughing Vulcan depicted on the tavern's sign. Starn decided that the stories of Town's depravity did not do it justice.

After ignoring him for several trips back and forth, the server finally stopped in front of Starn. "NuqneH, vulqangan?" the Klingon growled.

Starn considered for a moment that in this setting the standard Klingon greeting actually made sense. "bIQ," he snarled in reply.

The Klingon paused as if puzzled by Starn's perfect accent, then filled the trader's order for water by spitting on the counter in front of him.

Other beings nearby, who had listened to the exchange, froze. Had Starn also been Klingon, a glorious blood feud would have started that might have lasted generations. But Starn was not Klingon, though his knowledge of the empire's customs was comprehensive.

The server waited tensely for Starn to respond to the insult, his single eye burning with expectation. Starn slowly slid his hand beneath his cloak, and just as slowly withdrew a carefully folded white cloth. Keeping his eyes locked on the Klingon, Starn delicately dabbed the cloth into the spittle on the counter and began to raise the cloth to his forehead.

The server began to tremble. Starn moved the cloth closer to his forehead. Two Klingon mercenaries standing farther down the counter began to snicker. The cloth was centimeters from Starn's forehead when the server finally realized that the mad creature was not going to stop.

"Ghobe!" the server spat, and snatched the cloth from Starn's fingers. Starn sat motionless as the server used the cloth to wipe up the counter and then stormed away, his rage almost comical in its intensity. The mercenaries broke out in gales of harsh laughter. One of them motioned to a server, who guided an antigrav tray of food and drink through the tables. A few moments later, the server stopped the tray by Starn and passed him a sealed bubble of stasis water.

"With the compliments of the officers, trader," the server said.

Starn looked down the bar at the Klingon mercenaries. They smiled at him and made clumsy attempts at saluting him with third and fourth fingers splayed. Starn nodded in acknowledgment, to more laughter, then broke the seal on the bubble and waited for its field to collapse. Around him, the business of the tavern returned to normal.

Whatever else Starn was, he was a connoisseur. From its bouquet, he identified the water as coming from a desert world, high in complex oxides. With his first sip, he ruled out TNC 50 as its origin. The water had once been part of a photosynthesis-based ecosystem and this planet was lifeless. A second sip was all he needed. The water was from Vulcan. The mercenaries had sought to honor him. Starn placed the bubble on the counter and would not touch it again.

A pale blue hand reached out to the counter beside Starn. The movement was cautious and he turned slowly. An Andorian girl looked at him nervously. She was young, clothed in a tattered and obviously contraband Starfleet jumpsuit that matched her skin color, and she suffered from an atrophied antenna. Even the smallest and poorest of her people's families would have sacrificed everything to treat that twisted hearing stalk. The girl was something no Andorian should ever have been forced to be: alone.

Starn greeted her in flawless Federation Standard, again no accent to suggest it was not his first tongue.

The girl looked nervously from side to side. "Wass it a present brought you here, trader?" she asked in a sibilant whisper.

Starn nodded yes. He couldn't detect anyone nearby trying to eavesdrop, but noticed that the girl stood so that as he turned to speak with her, he looked straight across the serving area into the sensors hidden behind the fire. He didn't try to block them.

"And where was that present from?" the Andorian asked, shuffling and looking over her shoulder. Her withered antenna twitched and she winced in pain.

"Iopene," Starn answered. Another dead world whose now-extinct indigenous life had proven to be too competent in building lethal weapons. Even the empire banned Iopene relics from all but the noblest houses. The cutter that Starn carried had been the "present" that had convinced him to take the invitation to come to TNC 50 seriously.

"Thiss way," the girl said, and headed for the back of the tavern. Starn followed. Behind him, he could hear the mercenaries begin to laugh again.

The girl slipped quickly through a series of dark corridors. Starn kept up with her, ducking his head beneath the low Tellarite ceilings. They passed an entrance to a smaller serving area where Starn could hear Orion dancing music pulse in time to the cries from an unseen audience. He detected the scent of drugs outlawed on a hundred worlds, heard screams of pain and pleasure above the hum of cranial inducers, and committed to memory every twist and turn, every dark stairwell, for the long run back.

At last the girl stopped by an unmarked door. She gripped a gleaming gold handle on the doorframe and trembled as the embedded sensors read her palm prints and analyzed her sweat. The door clicked, then slipped open. The girl entered and motioned for Starn to follow.

A young Klingon waited behind a simple desk. A single glowpatch lit the room from directly above him and his eyes were deeply shadowed beneath his prominent crest. The Andorian scuttled to a corner. The Klingon rose gracefully and waved toward a chair across from his desk.

"Good of you to come, Trader Starn," the Klingon said in Standard. "I am Karth."

Starn took the offered chair, comfortably proportioned and padded for humanoids, and studied his host. Even for a Klingon, the being was large. The taut fabric of his tunic stretched across an impressively muscled physique. Starn compared the tunic with hundreds of military designs he had memorized in order to place his host within the Klingon hierarchy. With something close to amazement, he finally realized that what Karth wore was that rarest of Klingon garb -- a civilian outfit.

"Do you want something?" Karth gestured to a serving unit on the wall. "Perhaps... water?" The Klingon smiled, respectfully keeping his teeth unbared.

"Sensors in the fire pit?" the trader asked.

"Of course. The crime rate in Town is one of the lowest in the Federation."

"And in the empire?"

"Trader Starn," Karth began seriously, "all beings know there is no crime in the empire." Then he smiled again. "Though if you had touched that server's spittle to your head and become betrothed to him before all those witnesses, that would have qualified him for criminal proceedings. A very clever way out of a potentially disastrous situation. Kai the trader."

"Kai the Karth who gives such generous presents."

The Klingon settled back in his chair. The chair was massive, but Starn's sensitive ears heard it creak.

"As there is no crime in the empire," the Klingon said, "there are no presents, either. The Iopene Cutter is a down payment."

"Understood. What service do you require?"

Karth shook his head. "This is a foul language. So many ways around the point. Nothing direct. What service do you think, trader?"

"ChotneS," Starn replied instantly.

Karth glanced over at the Andorian girl. "We shall stay with this tera'ngan chirping. She speaks Hol much better than Standard." The girl stared blankly. Karth shifted his gaze back to Starn. "I want no heads of state removed, no leaders killed. This will be a simple act of murder, trader, not assassination."

"Whatever you wish to call it, the service is the same." Starn shrugged. "Who is to be the victim?"

"Don't you want to know the price?"

"After I know the victim."

Karth shook his head again, hands moving slowly to the edge of the desk. "You accept the contract now. You accept the price now. There will be no negotiation once the victim is revealed."

Starn considered his options. It was probable he could walk away from this now. But the opportunity for expansion that this meeting offered might not come again. However, if he did commit to the contract, in the end he would still be able to make a final decision concerning who would be the more difficult victim: the one who was now unrevealed, or a certain Klingon civilian.

"Very well," Starn agreed. Karth moved his hands back to the center of the desk. "But since I cannot know the cost or effort involved in this service, I must call on Klingon honor to seal our bargain. State your price." Starn was puzzled when he could detect no physiological response to his subtle insult. For a non-Klingon to bargain on Klingon honor implied either that the non-Klingon was an equal of a Klingon or that Klingon honor was suitable for animals. At the very least, Karth should have demanded a test of blood, if not death, but Starn could not hear any quickening of Karth's breathing rate or see any change in his skin color.

"Two hundred Iopene Cutters with feedback shields."

Two hundred! Starn concentrated on not disrupting his own breathing rate. Whole planets could be taken with a handful of cutters whose beams could tunnel through any force shield by turning the shield's own energy against itself in perfect counterphase.

"I was not aware that there were that many in existence," Starn said flatly. Two hundred!

"Do you doubt my word?" Now Starn picked up an immediate flush in Karth's face and a rapid escalation in breathing rate.

"I simply stated a fact. For such a price I will accept your contract. Again I ask, who is the victim?"

Karth motioned for Starn to approach the desk. He touched a keypad and images formed on the desk's surface. Starn watched intently.

At first he was stunned. Then impressed. The concept was brilliant. By this one single action Starfleet could be reduced to an uncoordinated swarm of helpless ships and starbases. The entire Federation could be brought to its knees. So many past wrongs would be repaid. Starn knew he would have accepted this contract without fee.

He leaned over the desk, studying the words and pictures, memorizing the diagrams and timetables. Already a plan was forming. It could be done. He was just about to step back from the table when he noticed Karth's hand on the keypad.

"Bring up the initial timetable again?" Starn asked.

Karth tapped out a three-key sequence. Starn watched the Klingon's exact hand movements carefully, then stepped back.

"I will be proud to carry out this service," Starn stated. "But I do have a question."

"I expect you to have many."

"Federation officials will not rest until they discover who is behind this action."

"That is not a precise question."

"What do you wish the officials to find out?"

"That is not a clear question."

"Should I leave evidence implicating the empire in this crime?"

Karth leaned back and snorted. He gestured to his dark face. "Who has set this crime in motion, trader? What do you think?"

Starn took his opening. "I think it is intriguing that I am being hired to commit this crime by a mechanical device attempting to pass itself off as a Klingon."

Karth's hands disappeared beneath the desk with unnatural speed. Starn twisted sideways and reached beneath his cloak. Karth jumped back from the desk, aiming a disruptor at Starn. The cutter's particle beam sliced through the air with a thunderous crackle, disassociating dust and smoke molecules. But Karth dodged! The beam erupted on his shoulder instead of his chest.

Starn stumbled back against his chair. The cutter whined as it cycled up to discharge again but it would take too many seconds. Karth's shoulder dripped with thick blue coolant. Wires and transtators glowed and sparked in the mechanical ruin. The Klingon robot leveled its disruptor and fired. Starn braced himself for disruption. The Andorian girl was engulfed in a sputtering orange corona and collapsed onto the floor. The robot placed the disruptor on the desk.

Starn looked over to the Andorian. Her body had not disintegrated. She was still breathing. A Klingon disruptor set for stun? What kind of madness was this?

"Neural disruption only," the robot said. "She won't remember anything of the last twelve hours. She didn't know." It pointed to its shoulder. The cutter beeped its ready signal in Starn's hand.

"You won't need that," the robot said, pushing small silver tendrils back into its shoulder. The arm beneath fluttered erratically, then jerked once and hung limply.

Starn replaced the cutter beneath his cloak. "You didn't kill her?" he asked.

"Low crime rate in Town. She'd be missed. There'd be questions. The important thing is that there be no witnesses." A flesh-colored foam sprayed from the robot's good hand to cover the open circuitry of its blasted shoulder. "Not now, and not when you carry out your contract."

Starn watched with fascination as the robot began to repair itself. He suddenly doubted that the Klingons had anything at all to do with this.

"That sounds quite... logical," Starn said and, thinking of the image that hung above the tavern door, he began to laugh.

Copyright © 1988 by Paramount Pictures