story identification - Space Dragon Book?

I need help remembering a SciFi book with an economics theme to it, and it was sort of Dragon related.

There was one SciFi story I read a long time ago that I can never remember the name of. It was about a galaxy where free enterprise was the name of the game, so long as you didn't break any laws almost anything went. Most sentient races were reptilian, and the galactic head honchos were a species we called Dragons. Mammals were by default second class citizens, so we had two strikes against us for being the new kids and for being hairy lumpy mammals.

The only other species that would talk to us were these giant rat things that made their living as galactic trash pickers and gossip mongers. The rest of the universe didn't care about humans at all. Even intelligent flowers had higher galactic status.

And somehow a lost colony figured into it all. We had a colony once and it had been wiped out by the flowers. Only, they weren't all gone. They were being used a slave labor. One of our ambassadors finally got to talk to a dragon, and the dragon quoted some obscure bit of galactic law. Which ended the story with a mercenary human army being hired by one race to clear out the flowers, and us getting our colony back.

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In Star Trek: Nemesis , just before the Enterprise rams into the Scimitar, Picard sends a text message from his captain's chair arm pad to Troi — who is manning the helm in lieu of the crewman who was just blown out through what was once the view screen — indicating that she should put full impulse on standby. (Literally, if you watch the scene closely, Troi's console prefaces the order with "TXT MSG" !) My question is: Did Picard also somehow warn crew members in the forward saucer section about what was about to happen? The ramming of the Scimitar was a heat of the moment decision. Considering that he also resorted to calling the auto-destruct sequence shortly after (which ended up being offline), he probably was of the mindset that any losses would be acceptable in order to hault Shinzon's march to Earth. Still, I'm curious. Answer The original script indicates that he called for the crew to " brace for impact ". Whether that call (or the comma...

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