This could be about revenge, but it wasn't a direct assassination attempt � Q's dealings with the Mukhtar assured him that if this one had wanted him dead, he'd already be gone. They were infamous bounty hunters in their own region of the galaxy, specializing in targets with psionic abilities, and it was entirely possible that someone had hired one to capture him without being entirely clear on the concept that he had no powers, none, not at all. Or this one could be acting on his own to capture Q � Q thought perhaps he recognized him from the last time he'd dealt with the species. Not that it would be at all fair if the species, or any of its members, wanted to punish him for what he'd done to them; he'd already ameliorated the damage by granting them a gift other species would kill for.

The Mukhtar were relentless, and very, very good at doing exactly this sort of thing. Q's odds of getting away were not good. But if he could get to the turbolift while the Mukhtar pursuing him was stunned�

Except the Mukhtar was directly in front of him now.

Teleportation. The Mukhtar species wasn't generally well known for being psionic themselves, and antipsi would definitely get in the way of a psionic power, but he'd moved much too fast to be using transporter technology, and the short distance suggested teleportation as well. So this guy was either born with or enhanced to have psionic powers. He wouldn't be able to use both his power and his antipsi at the same time, but with Ensign Sweet unconscious and Q powerless, he didn't need to.

Q backed up frantically, and then heard Veloz' voice behind him. "Freeze! Now!"

He turned sideways so he could see both Veloz and the Mukhtar at the same time. Veloz was holding a phaser. And Q didn't know any sign language, and didn't know if Veloz knew any sign language anyway, and the universal translator wouldn't handle sign language, and he couldn't talk. So he had no way to warn them that the Mukhtar were highly resistant to energy weapons. Stun would do nothing; kill might stun. Disintegrate would probably kill but not necessarily.

The Mukhtar charged at Veloz, who fired at him. The bolt struck dead on and did nothing, and then the Mukhtar was on top of Veloz, pinning them down. "Q! Run!" Veloz shouted.

Q hadn't gotten more than four or five meters when the Mukhtar shouted after him. "Ssstop, or thisss one diessss!"

Full of dread, Q brought himself to a halt, and turned slowly. The Mukhtar was sitting on the floor with Veloz in a headlock. It looked as if the security officer was unconscious again. Really, it was completely unfair that this guy knew the Vulcan neck pinch. Q had always thought the Vulcans protected their trade secrets better than that. "You're assuming I care," he tried to say, but of course, no sound came out.

"The posssturing is unessesssary. I have done my resssearch. You were crueler as an immortal. In thisss ssstate, you are unwilling to sssee anyone die fffor you, if you can ssstop it." The Mukhtar dropped Veloz and stood up, but his foot remained on their chest.

Apparently the Mukhtar could lip read. "If you're carting me off to be killed or tortured, then it's them or me, and they signed up for this. It's their job to make sure it's them, not me." He wished he could hear himself. It would be so much easier to convince himself if he could hear himself saying it confidently.

"That issss not the plan," the Mukhtar said. "I do not take jobssss if there issss a death penalty. And you will not be harmed ifff you cooperate."

"Until I get handed over to whoever wants revenge, for happy fun torture time? No thanks."

"You misssunderssstand. My client wantsss you for the sssame ssservissess you give the Fffederation. There will be no torture. Ssso long as you cooperate."

Q swallowed. His throat hurt very badly right now; attempting to talk when his vocal cords were paralyzed didn't seem to be a good idea. Also there was the fact that he was terrified. "Who is your client?" He wanted to demand it, but the fact that everything he was saying came out as a cracked, barely audible hoarse whisper made it rather difficult to make demands.

"That issss conffffidential, but you will learn ssssoon enough." The Mukhtar stared at him, the golden reptile eyes failing to blink. "Ifff you resssissst, I will kill thessse guardsss, and then I will capture you. You cannot call for help, and you cannot reach aid befffore I can reach you. A fffew movesss you may know, yesss, but you are no fffighter. It isss inevitable. Sssurrender, and I will not harm them."

Q sagged. Where had the Mukhtar learned about his weakness, the fact that every time a mortal died to keep him alive it had been like a knife in his heart? From Data, those very first days on the Enterprise, lying on the floor twitching and shorting out because he'd saved Q's life � and he, at least, had survived it! � through Dr. n'Vala, who'd died because he'd walked in on an assassin trying to kill Q, through Ohmura, who'd taken a gunshot meant for him... there had been others as well, and contrary to what the people on the starbase generally thought about them, Q knew all their names and was haunted by all of them. Even now, with some hope in his heart, he still found his existence far more miserable than any of the people who'd died for him had. Why did they die, when they wanted to live, for someone who could barely muster up the desire to keep going?

If this was a job offer they wouldn't have sent a bounty hunter. Assuming the Mukhtar was telling the truth � which he probably was; they didn't have a code against lying, but they generally avoided it unless it was necessary � Q knew that the plan here was to sell him into slavery. They wanted the services he'd freely offered the Federation � and plainly they weren't willing to take no for an answer.

The thought terrified him. But he couldn't have brought himself to let the Mukhtar kill the unconscious security guards even if the alternative had been his death. If he wasn't even being threatened with death... well, there might be a way out of this. Throw the Federation's weight around, buy his way out, trick his captors into letting him go, overpower the Mukhtar once they were aboard the bounty hunter's ship. He wasn't going to let innocent people die for him... especially since the Mukhtar was almost certainly right that it was going to end with his capture anyway.

"Fine," he tried to snap, but it didn't come across very well given the state of his voice. "I surrender. Let them go."

The Mukhtar bent down and shot a hypo of something into Veloz's neck, then walked over to Ensign Sweet and did the same. "They will sssleep. Come forward, to me."

With great reluctance, Q walked toward the Mukhtar. "Do you have a name?" he croaked. "I like to know a little about the various aliens who try to kidnap or kill me."

"My name is not your consssern." He reached into a pocket and lifted out a hypo of... something. "Come closer."

"What is that?" Q took a step backward.

"A drug to make humansss peassseffful and cooperative. You are clever; I cannot take the risssk that you will fffind a way to essscape while we are still on the ssstarbasse."

Terror shot through Q at the thought of a drug that would alter his mood against his will. "No. No, I don't � which drug? Tell me."

The Mukhtar sighed in exasperation. "It isss a low dosses of iolera root. It makes humansss euphoric and happy in high dossses, calm and friendly in low�what?"

From the clammy feeling in his face and the waves of nausea, Q suspected he'd just gone white. He was visibly shaking, and while his pride told him to stop that, his rational mind insisted that showing his fear was the right strategy, here. Guinan had told him he'd have to get used to begging, and in three years of being human, he had. He went to his knees. "No. No, I � anything but that, I'll cooperate, I promise, you don't need to drug me, I won't � I can't bear it, no � please, I � I don't care if you knock me out and drag me, or, or anything else, anything, just � not that. Not iolera root. No."

The Mukhtar frowned in puzzlement. "It isss not harmffful."

"Says someone who was probably never�" Q choked back what he was going to say. He could still remember being restrained in sickbay, screaming, begging to be given back to the Andorian who'd tried to kidnap him and dosed him with the drug to make him cooperative. Iolera root had made the world seem a wondrous, happy place where nothing bad could possibly ever happen, and for three days after they'd neutralized it in his system, all he could think about was getting more and going back to that place. It had overridden his will completely. "Please, I � some other way, you've got to have something else you can use. Please don't drug me, please."

"I... have a control implant inssstead. That isss an alternative."

"H-how does that work? What is it?"

"It attachesss itssself to the ssspine at the bassse of the neck. Insssertsss itssself into the ssskin and connectsss to the nervesss. It allowsss me to control your body if I mussst, or to caussse pain if you resssisst."

"But it doesn't control what I think or feel?"

"Assside from causssing pain, no."

"Yes. Do that, then."

The Mukhtar hesitated. "They are very painffful. You did not wisssh to be tortured; why would you prefer to be ressstrained with pain rather than happinessss?"

Q swallowed again. "That's not really any of your business," he muttered, looking away, and then realized the Mukhtar would have no idea what he just said if the bounty hunter couldn't see his lips. He looked up at his captor again. "I'm used to pain by now." That was a lie; he wasn't sure he'd ever be used to pain. But he'd far prefer pain to having his mind controlled. "I'll fight you if you try to use the iolera root. I might not win, but � but I could force you to kill me or break my head open. Then you won't be able to fulfill your end of the contract. If they want me this bad, I imagine they want my head intact and working."

The Mukhtar had no eyebrows, but managed to make his face look as if he was raising his eyebrows anyway. "And if I ussse the control implant... you will not fffight?"

Q swallowed again. It sounded like the device could bypass his brain entirely if the Mukhtar chose, and let the bounty hunter manipulate his body as if he were a puppet. Or use neurostimulation to cause pain, if he managed to resist anyway. He would never have imagined being in a circumstance where such a thing could be the lesser of two evils. Yet here he was. "I won't fight, no."

"Very well. If that isss your choissse." The Mukhtar removed a container from one of his pockets, a clear half-capsule, cylindrical with a hemispheric end on one side and a flat end on the other. Something spiderlike unfolded within it. Q trembled and forced himself not to look away.

"Ssstay on your kneesss and lower your head." Q obeyed, putting his hands down for balance. The Mukhtar pressed the half-capsule to the top of his head and then did... something, Q wasn't sure what. He felt something skittering through his hair and shuddered violently, forcing down the desperate desire to slap at it.

"Is it alive? You didn't tell me it was an insect or something!" he cried, but with his head down, the Mukhtar wasn't going to be able to read his lips and might not even be able to tell he'd spoken.

As he felt thready legs touch his skin, as whatever it was made its way out of his hair and down his neck, he looked up, unable to stay still any longer. "You never said it was alive!"

This time the Mukhtar saw him speak. "Becaussse it isssn't. It isss sssimilar in ssshape and locomotion to a long-legged ssspider, but it isss only a devissse. Not alive."

The panic subsided only slightly. Q had been phobic of insects and insect-like creatures since the Maierlen assassin had tried to kill him with a swarm of wasps. This thing that he was only managing to barely tolerate by the tiniest margin wasn't alive. It was a device. Admittedly a device intended to control him and keep him from being able to escape from being sold into slavery, but at least it wasn't also a bug.

He felt pressure against his skin at the back of his neck. "Give me your handsss," the Mukhtar said.

"What? Why? You've got a device that's supposed to control my body attached to my neck, what do you need my hands for?"

"It will be for only a minute. Part of the processss."

The Mukhtar snapped cuffs around his wrists. They were magnetic; as soon as they were secure, they held his wrists to the floor. "Why are you�"

And then the thing positioned against the back of his neck started drilling into his skin, and he realized why his hands were cuffed to the floor; no matter how much he'd resolved not to resist so the Mukhtar didn't feel the need to use the iolera root, there would have been no way he could have stopped himself from trying to grab the thing and pry it off himself.

Q screamed, almost soundlessly. He thrashed, struggling desperately, trying to pull his hands free of the floor so he could grab the thing burrowing into his neck, throwing his head back and forth to try to dislodge it. The pain was excruciating at first, and then both excruciating and viscerally horrifying as he felt the thing moving inside his flesh, burrowing through muscle.

It stopped, finally, leaving him with a horrible ache like a burn and a grating sensation in his neck, a feeling of wrongness, something where it should not be. But at least nothing was drilling anymore. His chest heaved, his throat burning with pain. Attempting to scream with paralyzed vocal cords had done nothing good for him.

The Mukhtar released the cuffs. Q was panting, trying desperately not to sob. He hated how weak pain made him look. At least he had kept himself from begging. "You happy now?" he mouthed, careful not to actually try to use his voice.

"I am sssatisssffied," the Mukhtar said. "Get up."

As Q got to his feet shakily, he heard Ensign Sweet's voice, shaky and uneven. "D-don' move!"

He turned. The security officer was still on the floor, propping herself up by an elbow, and he could see that her eyes couldn't focus particularly well. The Mukhtar hissed. "Why is ssshe... oh,� of courssse." He stalked over to her.

She held the phaser trained on him in a shaking hand. "Don' come closer..." she slurred, plainly trying to fight the drug he'd injected her with.

Q ran over and grabbed the Mukhtar's arm, pulling the smaller being around. The Mukhtar hissed at him. "You promised," Q mouthed. "Don't hurt her!"

"I have no need to harm her," the Mukhtar growled. "Back away, now, or you will dissscover the usssesss of my devissse."

"Stay back," Ensign Sweet mumbled, her accent exaggerated. "Ah'm warnin' yeh..."

"I apologizssse," the Mukhtar said to her, paying no attention to her threats as he walked over to her. "I forgot, you are a psssion. Hisss pain woke you, did it not?" She fired, several times. Only one of them hit, and it had no effect. The Mukhtar plucked the phaser out of her shaking hand. She tried to punch him, and he caught the punch easily. "It is no ssshame to be defeated by a ssstronger opponent. You have tried your bessst. Now sssleep." As she tried to grab him, he pulled out the hypo again and gave her another shot. "Sssleep."

Q wanted to tell her it was all right, that he didn't blame her for being defeated by the Mukhtar, that a human couldn't be expected to overpower a being who was genetically engineered to defeat and capture Lesser Powers, but he knew she wouldn't be able to hear him, or read his lips in her condition.

It was so unfair. His fists clenched. The Continuum had promised to protect him against anything that humans couldn't be expected to manage. The Q who'd betrayed him had even used a race of Lesser Powers as an example. But if humans couldn't be expected to be able to stop Lesser Powers, how could they be expected to stop a Mukhtar? 400 years ago the Continuum had sent Q to assess whether the Mukhtar could potentially be a threat to the Q. And his assessment had been yes. Not a severe threat, no, a Q at full power would have to be quite careless to be captured by a Mukhtar�but they all remembered the stories of Q who had gotten careless around some species or other that could threaten psionic beings, and the terrible fates those Q had suffered. He'd taken steps to reduce their ability to reproduce and dramatically decrease their numbers without having to harm them, precisely because they were a potential threat to a fully powered Q if that Q was incarnated in a mortal body. So how did they not qualify as too powerful a threat for the humans? Why hadn't the Continuum stopped this before it ever happened?

As usual, he could think of only one explanation � why they'd allowed the Borg to come within light-years of being able to capture or kill him, why all of his old enemies seemed to know where he was when he hadn't even had the same form back then. The Continuum had sold him out. They weren't protecting him, and some of them were actively betraying him. He was almost certain of it. He even thought he could probably guess who.

Ensign Sweet slumped back down to the floor. The Mukhtar turned back to Q. "Ssshe will have a terrible headache when ssshe wakesss," he said. "But sssinsse you ssseem to care... no permanent harm will come to her. Or to the other one."

Q scowled. He hated having a weakness like this. The security guards were here to protect him. He shouldn't care what happened to them if they couldn't get that done. But ever since he'd seen Data unconscious and twitching because he'd protected Q, and especially ever since Ohmura's blood and brains had been all over him and the man's limp body pinning his to the ground because the bullet intended for Q's head had ended up in Ohmura's instead... it was a weakness, and one he regretted, because he'd be safer if he could be more selfish, more like his old self that cared nothing much for the lives of mortals. But he couldn't change it. He was mortal now, and his life wasn't inherently worth more than theirs, as much as he wanted to believe otherwise, and the fact that they could be happy with their miserable little limited lives because they didn't know what they were missing, and he could never manage better than barely tolerating his existence because he did... no. He could no longer bear it when mortals died for him.

"Walk," the Mukhtar said, and moved to be directly behind Q. "Go to the turbolift. Do not ssspeak to it."

He was pretty sure he couldn't speak audibly to the turbolift, anyway. Q walked, and the Mukhtar paced directly behind him, less than half a meter between them. They passed a few maintenance workers... who didn't even glance their way. And when Q moved his head quickly, the air rippled, waves of distortion altering everything he saw for a moment. We're in a cloak. The Mukhtar had to have a portable cloaking device, powerful enough to cloak two people as long as they were very close to each other. He tried stomping his feet loudly as they walked, but still no one noticed. There must be sound dampeners built into the thing as well. A little overkill, don't you think? he thought bitterly. You took my voice, you put a device in my body to control me, now you've made me invisible and completely silent as well?

The Mukhtar pressed a round, palm-sized device to the side of the turbolift after they entered, and it began to move. When it reached the lower docking ring, he removed it. "Go forward. I will tell you when to turn."

There were a lot more people on the docking ring. For a moment Q entertained a brief fantasy of shouting for help... wait, no, his voice was still paralyzed. Well, he could bolt and run. Crash into someone. He'd be visible, outside the Mukhtar's field. Someone else could call for help.

Unless the Mukhtar quickly killed them to keep them from sounding the alarm. Q didn't know if the cloak could be expanded, if the Mukhtar could hide and silence another person or even a group of people if he tried to run. Also, with the control device attached to the back of his neck, he couldn't even guarantee he could run, more than a few steps anyway.

He stared ahead of himself, looking at nothing, his despair deepening. He didn't want any of this, but he couldn't see a way out. Not yet. The Mukhtar was too dangerous. But if he was telling the truth... whoever wanted Q wanted to enslave him, not torture or kill him. Maybe Q could work with that. Escape later, after he was handed over to the client. He just didn't see any way to escape a person who'd been bioengineered to take out Lesser Powers, when he himself was entirely powerless.

The Mukhtar species had been created hundreds of years ago by a species of Lesser Powers � Q no longer remembered their names � who had come to the belief that it was an abuse of their powers to use their powers for any sort of violent intent. Which was a perfectly reasonable thing for Lesser Powers to believe and rather more common than not among the ones that survived � the stage of development where mortals developed high-order telekinesis and other strong psionic abilities was one that most mortal species didn't survive if they didn't have strong moral beliefs suggesting they shouldn't harm and enslave each other. The problem, of course, was that, as with most species with a strong moral belief held by most of them, not all of them agreed. Which meant there were members of that species who did use their powers for violence, and if none of the ones with a strong moral center were willing to be violent in return, it gave carte blanche to the violent ones to do whatever they wanted.

So they had created a slave race to carry out justice, to hunt down and capture those of their own kind who used their powers to harm others, whether those others were others of their own species or any other species. The Mukhtar had the four-lobed brains that Ferengi and other similar species had, that set up interference patterns which psions couldn't read through. Unlike the Ferengi, though, they also had the ability to actively project the antipsionic field that their brains generated, which� would disable all psionic abilities in the vicinity. They had venom they could spit which paralyzed the psionic centers of the brain in most psionic humanoids, as well.

Of course, creating a slave race with a strong sense of justice and the ability to disable their masters' powers had been an incredibly stupid idea. Had the Mukhtar been created as partners rather than slaves, things might have been very different. A slave race with a strong sense of justice took only a few generations to figure out that slavery was an unjust thing by nature, and only another generation after that to overthrow their masters and free themselves. They'd then gone somewhat overboard, pursuing and capturing members of Lesser Powers all over the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, having come to the belief that having strong psionic abilities was itself a dangerous thing that couldn't be countenanced.

The Continuum had seen this and considered the possibility that a species that had been created to hunt Lesser Powers could potentially threaten Greater Powers � including the Q themselves. They'd sent Q to test them and assess the threat level. And since Q in mortal form would usually use the psionic centers of the mortal brain to access the Continuum, Q's assessment was that yes, they could be a potential threat. Any Q in mortal form who wasn't paying enough attention to see a Mukhtar coming could be cut off from the Continuum, unable to draw power or call for help. There had been Q who had been tortured that way in the past, some of them broken to the point where the Q had had to euthanize them. On the other hand, the Mukhtar didn't generally torture their targets; they imprisoned or killed them, and a Q in mortal form whose body was killed would just return to the Continuum, whether their psionic abilities in that form had been blocked or no.

So Q had decided that the species could live, for now, but its ability to reproduce needed to be drastically curtailed, to the point where they would painlessly come to extinction within a dozen generations or so. As created, the Mukhtar had females who entered heat, and fertility, every five or so Earth years, and strong pairbonding instincts making it very, very difficult for them to reproduce with any Mukhtar other than their bonded mate. Q had simply added a six-year fertility cycle to the males. Instead of being able to theoretically produce a child every five years from the age of 20 to the end of their 60-year life span, they'd get two shots at best in a lifetime, or else have to reproduce outside their pairbond. And their second opportunity to have a child would come so late in life, most wouldn't even take it.

They'd tried various strategies to overcome what Q had done to them � cloning, fertility drugs, adopting polyamory for those rare few who could endure it � but their population had still been in freefall when Q had gone back a hundred years ago to re-assess. By that point, they had shifted their attitudes and life strategies entirely. Instead of obsessively pursuing Lesser Powers, they'd adopted a much more mercenary outlook, because there were far fewer of them. For the most part, they hired themselves out as bounty hunters, or joined planetary police forces, and pursued those they were paid to go after... not always members of Lesser Powers, either. The skills that served them so well in taking down psionic people didn't hurt them in pursuing those without psi.

Because they had stopped chasing Lesser Powers for their own sake, and because a few who had passed his new tests had pleaded with him � and his tests hadn't been easy, so he'd been inclined to perceive those who'd passed as interesting and worth listening to � he'd altered the nature of the restriction. He hadn't changed the cycle he'd imposed on the males, but he'd extended their life span, so instead of living 60 years they lived between 150 � 200, giving them as many opportunities to have children as they'd had before, but spaced out over much more time so their population wouldn't grow quickly.

According to this one, this wasn't about revenge, and it wasn't hostage-taking to make the Continuum undo the restriction entirely (not that they would); it was just business. Maybe Q could talk him into taking a ransom from the Federation instead. He thought possibly he even recognized this one. Could this particular Mukhtar actually have been one of the ones in Q's last test group? Now that they lived longer, it was possible.

The Mukhtar ordered him to turn at one of the docking ports, and then did something to keep him paralyzed but on his feet, rigidly still, while the Mukhtar changed the cloak to make himself visible and checked out with that particular dock's security guard. He had Q move like a puppet, following a mere decimeter behind him, where the altered shape of the cloaking field hid him completely, and marched him past the guard and into the ship. Q hated every moment of it, wanting desperately to scream the whole time his body was under the bounty hunter's control, but it was objectively only a few minutes, no matter how many eternities it had seemed while it was happening.

Once they were aboard the ship, the Mukhtar freed him from the rigid control, and ordered him to the back of the small vessel. There was a single brig-type cell there, much like the one he'd been stuck in for several horrible hours aboard the Enterprise, or the ones Anderson had occasionally sent him to for refusing to do his job. A pallet fastened to the wall with a thin mattress bonded all around it, top, bottom and sides, and a small pillow bonded to that; an alcove with a toilet and a sonic freshener, but no mirror and no water; a very tiny replicator that could probably produce at best a small cup of water and a tray of food no longer than his foot; and a forcefield. Nothing else. Q observed that the floor squished slightly under his weight, and that he couldn't actually touch the walls. There was a forcefield around them as well, not one that produced a shock when it was touched, but one that impeded motion without stopping it completely, so that if he reached toward the wall it was like his hand was pushing through a vat of porridge.

No means of doing impact damage to himself. No way to get anything large enough to serve as a weapon out of the replicator, and he doubted it would give him a knife... possibly not even a fork. Nothing he could remove and throw, or anything he could tie his clothes around to give him leverage to strangle himself. Nothing that held enough water to drown himself; the toilet probably used dematerialization rather than water anyway, with the usual safety protocols that prevented an object from being dematerialized unless its entire surface could fit inside the toilet at once.

As soon as Q was inside the cell, something appeared within the replicator; a glass of some sort of thick golden liquid. "Drink, if you wisssh to ressstore your voissse," the Mukhtar said, gesturing at it.

The Mukhtar had no motivation to poison him, considering that the bounty hunter could have killed him at any point. Q took it and drank it. It tasted sickly sweet, with something in it that burned. "Did that work?" His voice was still hoarse, and it still hurt to try to use it, but at least he could make audible sounds. "Well. Better than nothing, I suppose."

He sat down on the bed as the Mukhtar piloted them out of the dock and took off. The ship was small, hardly larger than a shuttlecraft; Q could see most of what the Mukhtar was doing from here, and what he couldn't see was because it was blocked by the chair the reptiloid was sitting in. "So what is this?" he croaked. "I know you. Did you take this job because you wanted revenge, or something?"

The Mukhtar turned, having set in the course and engaged the drive. "There isss no need for revenge," he said. "You harmed usss and drove usss near to extinction. Then you gave usss long life to compensssate. I have no quarrel with you persssonally, but neither do I owe you anything. The assssignment was ssstrictly busssinesss."

"But I do know you, don't I?" Q persisted. "You were there, the last time I was on your homeworld."

"Yesss. My friendsss and I endured much at your handsss. Ssstill, the resssult wasss that I yet live, when the Mukhtar of my grandparentsss' age would have lived a full life, died, and their children the sssame, in the time I have lived."

"So I did you a favor!"

"After harming my kind, and forsssing me to watch my parentsss die of old age while I was ssstill barely out of childhood, sssimply becaussse I wasss their sssecond-born. Asss I sssaid, I owe you nothing. What you did was compensssation for the damage you had done."

"Well. If this is just business, maybe we should talk business." He leaned forward. "You've got to know how valuable I am to the Federation... and how much wealthier the Federation is than pretty much any other governmental entity in this area of the galaxy. Contact Commodore Anderson, once you feel you're at a safe distance. Tell her what your clients paid for me, and ask her to double it to get me back. She'll do it."

"Perhapsss. But then my reputation sssuffersss. If a mercenary doesss not ssstay bought for the prissse his clientsss paid, who will trussst him enough to hire him in the fffuture?"

"You don't have to tell them you got a better offer. Just tell them you couldn't do the job. The security was too good. You couldn't get at me."

The Mukhtar closed his eyelids slowly, then re-opened them as slits. "Do you think that would do no harm to my reputation, either? No. I promisssed to deliver you, for payment, and I will do ssso. Thisss attempt to bargain is futile, unssseemly and insssulting, and if you persssissst you will sssuffer ffor it."

Q sighed. "Fine. But you can at least tell me who bought me, then."

"I can." He stood up. "The name of their rassse is the Yoraika."

Q stared at him in shock. "Yoraika?" A single nod from the Mukhtar. Q came to his feet without consciously willing it, flinging himself at the force field � uselessly, of course. "You're a Mukhtar! What are you doing working for the Yoraika? They ought to be your sworn enemies!"

"Timesss are hard," the Mukhtar said. "No one is a sssworn enemy any longer, if they have ssssuffficient money to pay."

He turned back toward the console. Q's knees gave out on him, and he slumped to the floor. He wanted to beg, to bargain again, to throw himself at the forcefield until either he or it broke... but he knew perfectly well none of those things were going to do him any good.

He was going to be handed over to the Yoraika, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Not even kill himself. Though if he could think of a way to do it in time... he was fairly sure he'd prefer death.