Star Trek and all related characters and indicia are owned by Paramount. This work of fan fiction is written for pleasure, not profit.
Grayangle, JadziaKathryn: Thanks for the reviews.The downtown area was the most amazing place Wesley had ever seen. It put San Francisco to shame. He had never seen so many shops. There were stores and boutiques selling anything and everything he could imagine, and a few things he couldn't. And the crowds! He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen so many people in such a small area. Not that the shopping district was all that small. It seemed to go on forever. He, Geordi and Data wandered around for hours, poking their heads into whatever shops struck their fancy, buying food from street vendors, and watching the hordes of people. Finally they came to an enormous store that specialized in music.
"Hey, let's go in here!" Geordi suggested. Data, of course, would go along with just about any suggestion, but Wesley hung back. There were, he was sure, a lot of things in that store that were on the Controlled List. Things that he probably shouldn't see. Things that it was illegal for him to possess.
"I don't know, Geordi," Wesley said doubtfully. "If Counselor Troi knew we went in there..."
Geordi snorted derisively. "Relax, Wes. For one thing, Counselor Troi doesn't know we're here, and I won't tell her if you won't. For another, not everything in there is banned. If you see something you're interested in, just tell me. I brought a copy of the List with me." He hefted his personal tricorder. It was a civilian model, much bulkier than the standard Starfleet issued ones. Geordi had been taking pictures with it, pictures of just about everything they'd seen since they hit dirtside.
Wesley relaxed. "I suppose you're right," he admitted with a grin. "Let's go!" And with that he took the lead and plunged into the store.
The place was amazing. Wesley grinned at that. He'd been using the word 'amazing' a lot lately. Well, it was. He'd been in a music store in New York once that boasted that it had 'the largest selection of music in the Federation'. That might well have been the case, but it had nothing on this place. There were aisles and aisles of albums by thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of artists. And there was an entire wall covered with personal music players. Wesley started toward it without even realizing it. He had a music player of his own, but it was nothing like these. It had taken him six months to save enough work credits to acquire it, and it was a low end player. The store he'd bought it at had a few Selenker-made music players on display, but the prices were astronomical, so he'd settled for a Federation produced one. It was bulky, needed frequent cleaning, and went through it's charge in a couple of hours. Or had when he first bought it. With Geordi's help and some time in Engineering Wesley had managed to fix most of the defects and improve its performance significantly. Still, he'd been appalled at the shoddy workmanship with which the thing had been put together. He'd wanted to hunt down the manager of the factory where it was made and beat some sense into him, or at least get him to pay more attention to how his people did their jobs.
Wesley blinked when he saw the prices listed next to some of the players. One in particular. It was identical to the ones he'd seen in the store where he'd bought his own player, and it was priced at one forth of what it had been back home.
"Why is it so much cheaper here?" he wondered aloud. There was no good reason for it. Interstellar freighters were huge things, capable of carrying millions of tonnes of goods each. Hell, it cost less on a per tonne basis to move goods between stars than it did to move them from point to point on a planetary surface. So why in the name of the galaxy...?
"See anything you like?" Wesley started and spun around to see a kid about his own age standing nearby.
"Whoa, sorry, didn't mean to startle you," the kid said. Wesley, as his heart settled back into a normal rhythm, noticed that the kid was wearing a vest that had the store's logo on it.
"No problem," Wesley assured him. The kid smiled and repeated his question, with a minor variation. "I'm Ned. See anything you like?"
Wesley shook his head. "Well, yes, yes I do, Ned, but they're all so expensive..."
"On a budget, eh? How much do you have to spend?" Ned inquired politely.
Wesley wasn't exactly sure what Ned meant by that. Was he trying to find out how much money Wesley had? Then it hit him. Of course he was! 'He wants to know how much money I have so he can show me something I can afford!' Now, how much money did he have? He'd only brought fifty dollars, five of which had gone for the transit pass. He'd spent more on snacks, so he had about...
"Thirty-five dollars."
Ned pursed his lips. "That's austere," he commented. "Hmm. Well, we do have a few players in that range, but they're low end ones." Ned paused, thinking. "But now that I think about it, we have a few on close-out that are priced to move. Maybe one of those would do. C'mon, I'll show you."
Geordi watched Wesley follow one of the store staff along a display of personal electronic devices. "Wesley seems preoccupied, but would you keep an eye on him, Data? Say, five or ten minutes?"
The android regarded Geordi with his golden eyes. "Will ten minutes be sufficient time for you to...?" Data didn't get to finish his question. Geordi cut him off with a raised hand.
"Not out loud, Data. And yes, ten minutes should be enough." Geordi paused, looked at Wesley, cocked his head thoughtfully. "If he needs money to buy a decent music player, loan it to him, would you?"
"Very well," Data said, and moved off in Wesley's direction.
Geordi moved quickly. He had a list of fourteen titles memorized, and had them in hand in just a few minutes. Music chips were tiny things, rectangles of tough plastic about half a centimeter thick, a centimeter wide and three long. They stored their information in holograms that could be read and played back by nearly any brand of player. Since the Federation used the same recording standard the Selenkers did, compatibility wouldn't be an issue. Getting them on board the ship would be, but Geordi was an old hand at this. Counselor Troi didn't know it, but Geordi had hacked her secure database years ago. He had the latest copies of both the Controlled and Ancillary Lists, even the ones that hadn't been officially released, and he'd made his selections accordingly. Ten of the titles he meant to purchase were on the Controlled List, and if he was caught with them, he'd go straight to a Re-ed Center to have his brain blasted. An ordinary citizen, even an enlisted crewmember, might catch a fine for the first offence, but as an officer, Geordi would get the maximum punishment right off the bat. Have to make an example of him, and all that. But he wouldn't get caught. He hadn't been yet.
Three of the albums he was going to buy were perfectly innocent, as they appeared on neither List. One was on the Ancillary List, and would be the excuse for any nervousness he'd feel when Troi met him while he was declaring his purchases. The girl behind the counter was a bit puzzled when Geordi asked her to ring up the ten banned titles separately, but merely shrugged and did as she was asked. Once he'd settled up, Geordi ducked out of the store, found a place to sit down at a nearby bus stop, and went to work. He'd long since replaced the guts of his oversized civilian tricorder with the innards of a military issue one. That left quite a bit of room inside the casing, even after he'd weighted it with lead to get the weight back to normal. More than enough room for ten music chips. Said chips were soon safely in place, secured so they wouldn't rattle, and the debris from their packaging was consigned to a handy garbage can. Geordi smiled. He had connections to the Shadow Market all through the Federation, and knew several people who could handle making and distributing bootleg copies for him, as well as seeing to it that his cut of the proceeds was held for him until he called for it.
Worf kept a close eye on his tactical displays. Enterprise was floating in a parking orbit several thousand kilometers above Selenker, as were thousands of other ships. Avalon Control kept sufficient separation between ships that there was little danger of collision, but the sheer number of vessels made Worf nervous. Of course, there was more to his close attention to his sensors than mere concern for the ship's safety. The Selenkers had made it clear that active scans, with the exception of navigational radar, were unacceptable. It was possible to run passive scans however, even if the practice was uncommon in Starfleet and both the quality and quantity of information was considerably less than what might be acquired with Enterprise's active systems. That was what he was doing at the moment, trying to tease as much information as he could out of what the ship's sensors could see. The communications officer was doing the same thing, listening to the Selenkers as they talked to each other and the various ships in their system. The vast majority of it was routine traffic, but every now and then they stumbled across a nugget of useful data. At least the communications officer thought so. Worf understood the value of breaking enemy encryption protocols, but he would have much preferred to train his sensors on a Selenker warship, or better still, a live fire exercise. Ultimately, though, what he really wanted was a chance to take the Enterprise into action against one of them. Battle was the only true test of a warship's capabilities. Not that he would do anything that could be considered provocative. The captain had forbidden any such thing, and Worf wouldn't disgrace himself by disobeying the order. In his mind's eye, though, Worf could see a Selenker battleship blow apart under a relentless barrage of phaser and photon torpedo fire. It was a sight that warmed his heart. Perhaps, when his watch ended, he'd repair to one of the holodecks and run a few combat simulations. True, the sims weren't the best, since one hundred percent accurate models of potential enemy ships were difficult, if not impossible to get, but still. There was nothing like a few pitched battles to the death to get the blood flowing.
Dr. Beverly Crusher relaxed in her private office in the ship's main sick bay. She had just returned from a day-long tour of two groundside hospitals. Beverly allowed herself to smile. She suspected that her experiences with the Selenkers had been far less humiliating than some of her fellow crewmates had experienced. Beverly had found, in her travels throughout the galaxy, that doctors everywhere had a bond that superceded politics. After all, they were united against a common enemy, and that made it far easier to put aside mere matters of economic or social theory.
The hospitals she'd been taken to had, of course, been deliberately chosen by the Selenker government to make some political points, but even so, no one on the Selenker side had said so much as a word to that end. The charity hospital, of example. It was situated in a poor neighborhood of New Chicago, and supported itself almost entirely through donations. Patients were charged only what they could afford to pay, which was usually a mere pittance, or nothing at all. However, the hospital received not one cent of funding from the government, unless you counted the tax breaks that went along with being a charitable organization. Instead, its funds came from donations from private citizens, from religious organizations, and (surprisingly) from corporations that manufactured drugs and medical equipment. For all that, the level and quality of care had equaled the best hospitals in the Federation.
The 'for profit' hospital had been much more lavishly equipped, but it was run even more efficiently than the charitable one had been, and far more efficiently than most Federation hospitals. Beverly had commented on that, triggering the only real political discussion of her entire trip.
"Well, Dr. Crusher, it's a matter of competition, you see. If we don't provide top notch care at competitive prices, we'll lose customers and go out of business. We don't want that, so we're always looking for ways to economize and do things better." The words had been spoken by the CEO of the hospital, a man who was himself not a physician, but who seemed to command the genuine respect of the hospital staff. As political comments went, they were the mildest sort of reproof, barely rising above the level of 'dispassionate observation'. That hadn't stopped Deanna Troi, who had come along, from nearly having an aneurysm. Only a hastily delivered harsh glare had kept the Counselor from making what would no doubt have been a scathing retort.
Beverly glanced at her desk. The top was cluttered with gifts from her Selenker colleagues. There were copies of medical journals, several books (real books, not electronic ones) and perhaps most important of all, samples of newly developed drugs for a wide variety of diseases and conditions. Counselor Troi had been suspicious of all of it, but powerless to object, since acquisition of new medical technology was a high priority of the Federation government. Beverly supposed she could see Troi's point. The Selenkers guarded most of their advanced technology with rabid zeal. Medical technology was a major exception. Of course, Beverly had her own take on that. Like she often said, doctors everywhere were united against a common foe, Death. And it wasn't as if, in this one area at least, the knowledge flow wasn't a two-way street. The Selenkers had eagerly accepted her own gift, delivered on behalf of the Federation, of the latest Federation research journals, and samples of Federation drugs. That had galled Troi as well, though somewhat less so, since it was evidence of Federation/Selenker parity. Though now that she thought about it, Beverly realized that the thought that the Federation was the mere equal of a capitalist plutocracy would likely set Troi's teeth on edge, too.
Wesley walked out of the record store with his head in the clouds. His hands clutched his new music player protectively, as if he was afraid it would fly away if he let go of it. He still couldn't believe his good fortune. He'd been all set to by one of the remaindered players Ned had showed him when Data had walked up and offered to lend him enough money to buy a fancy, high end player. After all, the android had explained, he had little use for the work credits he received for performing his duties, and so had plenty of them. Wesley had taken Data up on his offer instantly. He'd been giddy then, but after Ned told him that the player came with one hundred songs of his choice loaded into the player's on board memory, Wesley had become downright rapturous. The selection process had taken some time, mostly due to the need to check particular songs against the Controlled List, and it was nearly local noon by the time they finished up and left. After tapping Wesley on the shoulder to get his attention (Wes had his earphones on, and was playing a tune loudly enough that Geordi could hear it) Geordi suggested, "I'm hungry. Who wants lunch?"
