Deny Thy Father Page 9

  Kyle shook his head fiercely. Those were questions of the past. While the past could be visited, with considerable difficulty, it could not be substantively changed, so it did no good to dwell on those matters. Kyle had never considered himself a great intellect, but he was a great problem solver. He didn’t like wrestling with issues that had no solutions. Instead, he did what he always did at such times, visualized his mind as a series of boxes. He took his thoughts of young Will Riker, tucked them deep into one of those boxes, and closed the lid on them.

  Chapter 10

  By the time they had all come down from the hills of Twin Peaks, the sun was sinking toward the ocean and the air was getting colder. “I’m hungry,” Dennis Haynes said when they met up. “What about the rest of you?”

  “I could stand something to eat,” Boon replied.

  “Me too,” Estresor Fil said. For her, food was often a matter of urgency. With her tiny size and fast metabolism, every meal was processed quickly, and she couldn’t wait too long for the next. Even as they’d made their way to Twin Peaks she had snacked now and again. When she needed food her patience grew short and so, Will had noticed, did her sentences. “Really hungry.”

  “We should eat something, and find some shelter for the night,” Dennis suggested. “We can brainstorm on the new clue while we rest and hit it first thing in the morning.”

  Will was glad to see that Dennis was finally taking a leadership position. “Do you think the other squadrons are doing one a day?” he wondered.

  “That’s what it should average out to, anyway,” Dennis reminded him. “Five clues, five days, right?”

  “That’s true,” Felicia said. “So we might as well pace ourselves.”

  “Does anyone have any ideas for a place to sleep?” Dennis asked.

  “There are several public shelters,” Estresor Fil pointed out. “That we can find after we eat.”

  Dennis laughed, getting the point. “Okay, let’s go feed ourselves,” he said, starting back toward the city itself. Everyone else followed.

  “I think we should avoid the public shelters, though,” Will suggested. “The other squadrons might be there.”

  “So?”

  “So you really think they won’t try to sabotage us if they see us?”

  “We could do the same to them,” Boon offered.

  “I’d rather try to win fairly,” Felicia put in. “Without doing anything to hurt anyone else’s chances, just by being the best.”

  Boon pretended to stifle a yawn. “That’s no fun, Felicia.”

  She shot him an angry glare. “You may not think so, Boon. But it’s the way I’d like to play it, and I think it’s the way Admiral Paris wants it. If you don’t think so, maybe you should reconsider a Starfleet career.”

  Boon stopped in the middle of the street, pulling himself up to his considerable height, and loomed over Felicia. “Don’t be so sure of yourself,” he said, his voice low and rumbling. Will wondered if he should intercede, but then decided that if Boon moved from menacing to actual violence, Felicia would be able to handle him. “Sure, they talk about fair play and honor and integrity and all that stuff, but you think they really mean it? When the chips are down and it’s them or you, you’d better do whatever is necessary to make sure you walk away and they don’t.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Dennis said. “Starfleet doesn’t just talk about integrity; they personify it.”

  “They’re right, Boon,” Will said. “If you don’t think so, you don’t know much about Starfleet’s history.”

  Boon shook his head, scoffing at the others. “Some people are so naïve,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, when I’m sitting in that captain’s chair, I hope I don’t have any dreamers like you all on my crew to worry about.”

  “With an attitude like that,” Will replied, “I don’t think you’ll ever have to worry about being in the captain’s chair at all.” He was surprised that this side of Boon had never emerged before. But then, he hadn’t know the Coridanian that long, just during this school year. And none of their group projects had forced them to spend as much time together as this one would. Any personality conflicts that were simmering beneath the surface would surely come out during the week’s forced intimacy.

  Boon leaned forward threateningly and Will braced himself, believing that the Coridanian was going to attack him instead of Felicia. Boon had height and reach on him, Will knew, and if it was going to be a fight it would be a brutal one that he would either win quickly or not at all.

  Before either male could surrender to the testosterone that fueled them, however, Estresor Fil inserted her tiny form between them. “I need to eat,” she implored. “Now.”

  Will held Boon’s yellow eyes for a few more seconds, then ticked his head toward the diminutive Zimonian. “She’s right,” he said. “We need to get her fed—all of us, really—and we need to stick together. You willing to do that?”

  Boon breathed heavily, but Will could see his body relax, his fists unclench. “Yeah, okay,” he said, sounding a bit reluctant to call off the fight. Will had the sense that their reckoning was merely postponed, not canceled.

  With the tension dissipated, though not eliminated, they turned once again to the question of food. Finding some was not difficult—no one went hungry in San Francisco—and they ate at an outdoor table. Boon and Will sat at opposite ends, but the group kept the conversation away from the recent incident between them. Dennis steered it back toward the question of lodging for the night.

  “If we’re going to avoid public shelters,” he said, with a furtive glance toward Boon, “then we’re going to have to come up with some alternative. I don’t want to spend the night on the streets, and we can’t go back to our rooms at the Academy.”

  “Let’s approach it as if we really were on a mission,” Will suggested. “We’d want to stay someplace discreet, where the local authorities wouldn’t notice us. We wouldn’t want to interact much with the locals, if we could help it, until we had the lay of the land better. Since we spent most of today trying to meet up and then climbing mountains, we didn’t really get to do that.”

  “I know a place,” Felicia offered.

  “Where?” Dennis asked her. “I hope it doesn’t involve any more climbing.”

  “Remember that doorway that Estresor Fil found this morning? No one went in or out. The windows were all blacked over. I think it’s an empty space, and obviously it’s not getting much use, if any.”

  “You want to break in?” Dennis asked, surprised.

  “Exactly. We don’t have to hurt anything. We just go in, sleep, and leave in the morning.”

  “That’s illegal,” Estresor Fil pointed out.

  “So?” Boon asked, the first word he’d said since he and Will had faced off on the street. “Like she said, we wouldn’t hurt anything. If we were on an away mission in hostile territory, we wouldn’t hesitate to break a few minor laws to save our own skins.”

  “I suppose,” Estresor Fil said, more loquacious now that her stomach was full. “Although I don’t feel very comfortable with the idea. Weren’t we specifically forbidden from breaking laws?”

  “There are laws and there are laws,” Boon argued. “In San Francisco, anyone who doesn’t have a place to sleep is entitled to go to one of the public shelters. That’s why they have them. But if we don’t want to do that—and if we were on a secret mission here, that would be the last place we’d want to show up—then we have to bunk someplace else. We don’t want to stay in a tourist hotel, again since we’re supposed to be here secretly. Either we make friends with one of the locals, in a hurry, or we go with Felicia’s idea.”

  “We don’t seem to have a lot of options,” Will agreed. “And it does seem like if you’re trying to hide from the authorities, going to a shelter run by those same authorities is a bad idea.”

  “It’s hard to argue with that,” Dennis admitted. “I still don’t think I like the idea, but—”<
br />
  “You got any better ones?” Boon interrupted.

  “That’s precisely the problem,” Estresor Fil put in, having apparently been won over. “Either we don’t break any of Admiral Paris’s rules but we do the single thing that would most likely result in our capture, or we break rules judiciously and carry out our assignment.”

  When she finished, all eyes went to Dennis.

  “I don’t like it,” he said at last. “But since I can’t, in fact, think of anything better, I agree that it seems like the best of our limited options.”

  By the time they’d finished their dinner, the sky had gone dark.

  They caught an underground transport back to Nob Hill, checking the route maps to see if there were any obvious clues to an artist who spanned the globe. There weren’t, so they continued back to the corner at which they’d met earlier that day, and with which Will and Estresor Fil had become so familiar. At the doorway alcove, Boon took the lead in the breaking-and-entering process. He said he’d done it several times, at home on the hardrock mining planet of Coridan.

  “Security might be a little better here,” Dennis suggested in a nervous whisper.

  “Are you calling Coridan some kind of primitive backwater?” Boon demanded.

  “No, not at all,” Dennis said quickly, backing away a step as if Boon’s words had carried physical force.

  “Look, Boon,” Will said, stepping up and forgetting his earlier resolve. “I don’t know if your problem is that we elected Dennis to lead the squadron on this mission, or what. But you’re acting like someone with a chip on his shoulder the size of the moon. If you can’t leave your personal feelings behind and carry on with the mission, then you should just tell us now so we can report back to Admiral Paris that we failed.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Riker?” Boon asked with a snarl. “You sabotage everything you ever do, guaranteeing you’ll never succeed at anything so you won’t really be tested. You’d just love to shoot a hole in this project right off the bat.”

  The accusation stunned Will. He had never thought of himself as self-destructive, and he doubted that Boon knew him better than he knew himself. But at the same time, he knew that sometimes others saw unpleasant traits in people that they couldn’t see in themselves. He decided to shelve any further examination of the issue, to consider later. Right now, they had a building to break into.

  “Never mind my psychological shortcomings, Counselor,” he shot back. “Can you open that door or not?”

  Boon had already turned away from the others and had the faceplate removed from the keypad. “Yeah, just give me a few minutes to reprogram this,” he said. Will tried to watch but Boon blocked his view with his broad shoulders and quickly moving hands. “This one’s easy. I’ve seen some with multiple redundant alarm systems, but this—well, I guess there’s nothing in here worth taking.”

  “That’s okay,” Felicia said, sounding maybe a little nervous that she’d suggested this in the first place. “We’re not taking anything. Is there a lot of crime on Coridan?”

  “A fair bit,” Boon said. He closed the faceplate and put his palm against the keypad, and the door irised open for him. “All that dilithium, you know, and other valuable minerals. Left us wide open for all sorts of folks to come around and take whatever they could get their hands on.” He stepped to the side and bowed toward the doorway, indicating that the others should enter first. As he did so, he looked right at Felicia. “Of course, if I read you right, you were asking if I committed a lot of crime on Coridan. Which, of course, is impossible—I wouldn’t have been accepted into the Academy if I’d had a criminal record, now, would I?”

  Will knew, of course, that a criminal record was something you acquired only after you’d been caught. In the past few hours, he had learned not to underestimate Boon in any way—including, it seemed, his skills at illegal entry.

  The inside of the building was primarily a single empty room, with bare walls and floor. A few support beams broke up the emptiness, but that was all. It had been, or would be, a shop of some kind, but currently it was nothing at all except temporary shelter for five Starfleet cadets, tired and excited and a little scared, all at the same time. At the back of the large vacant space they found a separate storage area with a working bathroom, which the cadets took turns with. Running water was more than Will had dared to hope for.

  Since they’d come empty-handed, there were no blankets or pillows to make the bare floors more comfortable, but they were so tired from the day’s events that it hardly seemed to matter. Will chose a spot at some distance from the others, with a view of the door. He could be a heavy sleeper, he knew, and if anyone came in the door he wanted to be close enough to hear it right away. He had just closed his eyes, though, when he heard someone come close to him and take a seat on the floor. He opened his eyes again, to see Felicia smiling down at him in the dim light.

  “I just wanted to say I’m sorry that you got into it with Boon,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “We need to stick together if we’re going to succeed at this project.”

  “I’m not the one who has to be convinced of that,” Will replied. As soon as he said it, he realized it might sound harsher than he had meant it to. “I’m sorry,” he quickly added. “I guess I’ve underestimated him. I always knew he was kind of pushy and headstrong, but I didn’t understand the full extent of it. I hope it doesn’t come to violence, but if he insists on a fight, then he’ll get one.”

  She put a gentle, soothing hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got to try to avoid that,” she said. “For all our sakes. Do you think we’ll get a passing grade on this project if you two pummel each other half to death? Besides,” she appended, her voice softening, “I really would hate to see you get hurt. I wouldn’t mind seeing Boon taken down a few pegs, I guess. He could use the lesson. But it would bother me if you were injured in the process.”

  In the near dark of the empty space, it was hard to tell for sure, but Will thought that her cheeks might be crimsoning with this confession. He wasn’t quite sure how to respond. “I can take care of myself,” he said, knowing even as he spoke that it was the wrong thing to say, too dismissive of her concerns, too tinged with self-serving braggadocio to be at all meaningful. “I mean, I would try not to do anything that could jeopardize our grades, and I kind of like myself unbruised and unbroken. Don’t worry, Felicia. I’ll do my best to keep things calm.”

  She released his shoulder now, after a final, firm squeeze. “See that you do, Mr. Riker,” she commanded. “I kind of like you that way myself.”

  Then she moved away and Will settled in, resting his head on his shirt, thinking that all in all, it had been a pretty eventful day. Even this late in the year, his squadron mates were full of surprises—none more so than Boon and Felicia; Boon for his unexpected truculence and Felicia for her sudden attention.

  He couldn’t even guess at what the next days might bring, but as he drifted off to sleep he figured they’d be challenging, if nothing else.

  Chapter 11

  There was one other human passenger on the Morning Star, Kyle soon learned, He was exploring the corridors; two days out from the dock, he still barely had the hang of the huge ship’s layout, and he was pretty sure he’d made at least a couple of wrong turns.

  The ship was nothing but functional, and even then more for Kreel’n than humans. The corridors were narrow and low-ceilinged, with handrails for the top-heavy beings further crowding the available space. Floors, in many places, were simple gridwork, providing access to the miles of tubes and wires and circuits that kept the ship in flight. Doors were opened by a complex system of push buttons—easy for the multifingered Kreel’n, but a little tricky for Kyle.

  On this particular morning, Kyle had been looking for the gym he’d been told was on the fourth deck below his—all the decks were identified by Kreel’n symbols which looked like nothing more than squiggles to him, so he had to count every time he went up or dow
n the ladders, on which the rungs were far too close together for his long legs. The ship had no turbolifts, he learned to his surprise.

  He had found the gym, but it hadn’t taken long to discover that none of the equipment inside it was suitable for his physiology. He’d have to settle for the exercises he could perform in his own quarters, without equipment, supplemented by runs or walks through the long corridors.

  Heading back to his quarters, he had indeed taken a wrong turn somewhere—he thought probably at one of the several points where five or six passageways converged on one another in a star pattern—and, trying to backtrack, had found himself in a part of the ship he hadn’t yet seen. Here, pipes hung down from the metal ceiling, suspended by thin steel straps, and the burning rubber smell that he was already getting used to was largely obscured by a harsh oily stench. Even the air seemed thicker in this area. Kyle found himself blinking as the atmosphere stung his eyes. He turned a corner too fast and smacked his head against a low-hanging section of pipe.

  “Ow!” he shouted involuntarily. He rubbed the sore spot, certain that a bump would appear before long, hoping he hadn’t broken the skin so that whatever was crusting the outside of the pipe wouldn’t get into his blood. He was starting to duck underneath the pipe when a door opened before him and a human man smiled at him.

  “I thought that sounded like a human voice,” the man said. “I’d heard rumors that there was another one of us about, but wasn’t sure, given the size and design of this tub, that we’d get a chance to meet one another.” His accent sounded indefinitely continental, as if he’d lived many places and spoke a plethora of languages, all of which contributed a little something to his English. “It’s nice to hear once in a while.” He was still standing in the doorway, hands gripping the jambs on either side of him, sort of leaning out into the hall but ready to flee back inside at a moment’s notice. He was a friendly-looking fellow, Kyle thought, with a thick black beard that merged with the tufts of black chest hair visible above his open shirt. He had little hair on the upper part of his head, though, and what there was he kept cropped close to the scalp. His smiling face was broad, with a large red nose, small red eyes, and puffy, rosy cheeks. He looked to Kyle like a young, disheveled Santa Claus. The illusion carried down to his belly, which was immense. His expansive shirt was checked, red and white, and his pants were pale blue. His feet, Kyle noted, were bare.