Текст книги "Deny Thy Father"

Автор книги: Jeff Mariotte

Соавторы: Jeff Mariotte
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When Felicia had dismissed him—and he’d been a little hurt by then, because, after all, who wouldn’t want to be the otherperson in that triangle, the one that Felicia sent somebody away in favor of?—Dennis had taken the opportunity to go back to his room and start searching for a soldier he could research. But his eyes kept glazing over as he tried to focus on his computer screen, his attention kept being drawn to the city beyond the window. The occasional shuttlecraft flashed by, lights blinking in the darkness, and the nighttime illumination of the city spoke of thousands of lives being lived out there.

Felicia was a beauty, there was no doubt of that. But it was to Will, not Felicia, that his thoughts kept wandering. William Riker had something, some quality, that Dennis couldn’t put his finger on.

It wasn’t just that Felicia obviously preferred Will to him, though they’d both known her for about the same length of time. Certainly Will was a handsome guy, and Dennis was a little surprised he didn’t have girlfriends all over the place. But what got to Dennis was that, although Will struggled, he always seemed to come out fine in the end. He had turned his grades around, and now seemed to be on course to finish this year near the top of their class. His other, nonacademic pursuits—athletics and extracurricular activities—were career builders that could take Will far in Starfleet. He was popular, and had made contacts among faculty, staff, and fellow students that would help him immensely in the years to come. He had never made it look effortless, but he made it look possible.

Dennis, on the other hand, felt as if he were drowning, like the water got deeper every day and he could barely see the sky above its surface anymore.

He had just turned back to the computer screen, intent now on finding someone he could study up on, of turning at least this one assignment into a success instead of adding it to the pile of work not-quite-done that threatened to swamp him and drown his career before it started, when there was a knock on his door. “Come in,” he called.

Estresor Fil opened his door and walked in. He waved her toward his couch, and she sat down, her feet no longer touching the floor when she eased her bottom all the way back into it. “Hello, Dennis,” she said as she made herself comfortable.

“Hi, Estresor Fil. What are you up to?”

She seemed surprised by the question. “Visiting,” she pointed out.

“Of course,” he said. “I meant ... never mind.” He was, in fact, a little surprised by her appearance. They were friends, certainly, but rarely saw one another outside their group.

“Am I disturbing your work?”

He sighed. “If I had been actually working, you might be. But so far, not.”

“You would let me know if I were, right?” she asked.

“Yes, Estresor Fil. Don’t worry about that. Is there some particular reason for your visit, or is it just a social call?”

She considered the question for a moment, causing Dennis to believe there was something more to it than a simple drop-in. Maybe she was uncomfortable talking about it, though. Which, given her ordinarily blunt nature, probably narrowed down the likely topics considerably.

“Social call,” she finally said. “Or possibly not ... I do, in fact, find myself in need of some assistance. Dennis, how much do you know about love and romance? Earth-style, I mean.”

Dennis had had a few casual girlfriends over the years, but hardly considered himself an expert on such things. And then there was the question of why she had come to himwith such a thing. Did Estresor Fil have a crush on him? He wasn’t quite sure how he would feel about that. Complimented, certainly, but she looked just a bit too much like a praying mantis for him to be able to return the compliment. “Not really that much, I guess. I mean, I know the basics, in principle, but when it comes to putting them into practice I’m as useless as the next guy. Why do you ask?”

“It’s just all so confusing to me. I try to figure these things out by myself when I can. And there’s an episode of Squirrely Squidthat is really quite helpful, I think.” Dennis wasn’t sure what a primitive holotoon series for children would really have to say about adult love and romance, but he knew Estresor Fil too well to point that out and he kept his doubts to himself. “But even with that, there are some things I just don’t understand.”

“Like what?” Dennis asked. He didn’t have high hopes, but he’d be helpful if he could.

Estresor Fil crossed her ankles and broke eye contact, another indicator that she was oddly uncomfortable. “How do you tell? If someone likes you, I mean?”

Dennis had struggled with that one his whole life. Who didn’t? After third or fourth grade when there was a lot of arm-punching going on—although at the time, he remembered, he had not correctly interpreted the punching either, he had been pretty much lost unless a girl actually came to him and more or less confessed her attraction. “I guess you just sort of have to know it. By the way they talk to you, the way they look at you. If they touch you a lot, you know, just casually. Or sometimes you have to come right out and ask them, I think. And always be prepared to get turned down.”

“That’s just so silly,” Estresor Fil said. “It’s so much easier for Zimonians. If we’re interested in someone, that way, we simply display ourselves. If they are interested in us, they will come over and say so. If not, they pretend they didn’t see the display and there’s no more discussion of it. But there is no ambiguity, no wondering or trying to guess.”

“By ‘display,’ you mean ... ?”

“Of reproductive organs,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of. I don’t think that would go over well here,” Dennis warned her. “Especially at the Academy.”

“Oh, I know that,” Estresor Fil reassured him. “I wasn’t suggesting it, just pointing out that our way is vastly preferable to yours. When you leave it all up to guesswork, mind reading, and so on, I think you are just creating barriers to happiness. Particularly since there are so few genuine mind readers among you.”

“Maybe so,” Dennis admitted. “But the other way might be just a little bit distracting to those around you. Is there ... some special person you’re interested in?”

Estresor Fil still couldn’t meet his eyes. “Yes,” she admitted after a long moment. “All of you—humans, I mean—looked sort of funny to me when I first got here. So tall, with skin colors that are so bland, and such odd facial features. I think part of why I like your cartoons so much is that there’s such variety in the characters, far more than in your actual species. But I have come to see that there is beauty among you, and one person in particular has caught my interest. I think I might be in love, but I’m not really sure how you tell. And I am definitely not sure how to tell if that person loves you back.”

“If you could come up with a certain answer to that one,” Dennis said, “you’d be the most popular being on the planet.”

“I feel ... shy ... about telling you who it is,” Estresor Fil said, almost in a whisper.

Dennis wanted to put her at ease if he could. Even though she had definitely unsettled him with this whole line of conversation. “Don’t feel like you have to, if you’re not comfortable.”

“But I want to talk to someone, Dennis. Someone who may be able to help answer my questions and concerns.”

“And you think I’ll be able to do that?” he asked.

“Possibly. But I find myself oddly embarrassed.”

Dennis wasn’t sure how someone whose idea of the proper way to express romantic attraction involved the public display of reproductive organs could be embarrassed about speaking a name, but decided that was a matter for sociologists, not for him. “I’m not very judgmental,” he assured her. “And I promise I won’t laugh or anything. If you want to talk, I’m here to talk to.”

She took a deep breath, which he found a very human thing to do, and let it out slowly. “Very well. I find myself quite taken with Felicia Mendoza. Do you think that she would ever return my interest, Dennis?”

Felicia?Dennis was in shock. He had always assumed that Felicia and Will would get together at some point, and when she had chased him away to corral Will this afternoon, he thought maybe that point would come sooner rather than later. He’d never really talked to Felicia about her love life, but he had never seen any signs, at least that he recognized, that she was attracted to the diminutive green alien with the huge popping eyes.

He could feel her gaze on him, and now he couldn’t bring himself to meet it. “Am I just being foolish, Dennis?” she asked. “Do you think ...” He could hear the hurt in her voice as she considered the possibility.

“I ... I really don’t know, Estresor Fil.” That was the truth, at least. “I don’t know what Felicia is looking for, that way, or who. If anyone. I’ve never really discussed it with her.”

“So there’s a chance?” Now her voice sounded hopeful, and he didn’t want to be responsible for dashing that hope.

“A chance? Of course there is,” he promised her. “There’s always a chance.” I think.

Riker?

Nothing. Nothing at all.

But the search continues?

Of course it does.

Friends, family, interviewed? All known prior whereabouts examined?

Except Starbase 311, of course.

Of course.

Otherwise, yes. The son, Will Riker, knows nothing. Neither does the woman.

Pulaski? The doctor?

That’s right. She hasn’t heard from him. She’s not happy about it. They were together only a brief while. He seems to have hurt her badly.

No surprise. It’s the kind of man he is. Cold, unfeeling.

It was hard to tell if she was angrier about the fact that he vanished without telling her, or about the fact that she was being asked about him.

She’s a good doctor? This Pulaski?

One of our best.

Then let her live.

Are you sure? He might still have some feelings for her.

Her punishment, for caring about Riker, will come when she learns of his death.

Fitting.

It’s all fitting. That’s the point. It isn’t truly justice if it doesn’t fit the crime.

That’s all I want. Justice.

That’s all any of us want. Justice. And Riker’s head in a box.

Chapter 17

“The land here is as God-forsaken as ever a man has set eyes upon. It is swampe, most of it, with almost no solid erth to walk on. With every step your boots sink deeper into the muck and fill with brackish water. The swampe stinks and is ful of bugs and even gaters which can bite a man before he sees it coming. Fore the last three days and nights I have never been dry but always wet and misirabel. Priv. Rector pulled a leech from my neck, afternoon yesterday, and then found four on his own legs, under his trous., drinking his blood. We are only days from Savanna, they say, where the Navy waits for us. But the days and nights are cold and we are hungry and ready to fight.

“Its a good thing the taste of our victories in Atlanta and since still remain in our mouths, and the cheers of the slaves who follow us from place to place, to drive us on through this because in a long and hard campaign I cant remember the boys ever beeing so unhappy and fed up. We know what we do is importent and Gen. Wm. Sherman, or Uncle Billy as the boys call him, keeps telling us so. I just keep going, try not to complane, and some of the boys have started calling me Old Iron Boots because they say nothing can stop me from taking the next step. Maybe they are right. Anyhow I guess its all a man can do is to keep marching. We havent seen a Johnny Reb to shoot for two days so we just keep pushing threw the swampe trying to keep powder dry and muskets ready.”

Will closed the old book and carefully set it down on his desk. He’d meant to just skim through it, but he found that the stories Thaddius Riker told—despite his rather primitive literary skills—were fascinating. Riker had accompanied Major General William Tecumseh Sherman on his long fight to Atlanta, and at this point in the tale, they had moved on after putting that city to the torch, headed for Savannah and the sea. Will knew enough about military history to realize that Sherman’s assault on Atlanta and then Savannah proved more than successful, that it was a turning point in the war, capturing one of the Confederacy’s most vital supply centers and cutting Southern rail links. Additionally, by leaving detachments behind to maintain his own supply lines all the way back up to Nashville, Sherman had cut off the South’s western states from the capital in Richmond. The move had been bold, brilliant, and extraordinarily effective.

Sherman, it was said, had coined the phrase “War is hell,” and Old Iron Boots Riker’s diary seemed to confirm that assessment. An earlier entry, about a friend of Thaddius’s whose arm had been amputated in a field hospital by a drunken surgeon using a dull, rusted bayonet, had been as good a description of hell as any Will ever hoped to read. Will’s ancestor had indeed been through hell, but he had survived it.

Anyway, reading the diary had helped to take Will out of his own life and concerns, which was good because otherwise he’d have been thinking of nothing but Felicia day and night. There was nothing wrong with thinking about Felicia, he resolved, but there had to be limits, even to that. He wasn’t opposed to having a social life, even a romantic one, but he was at the Academy to do a job, to prepare himself for service to Starfleet, and even Felicia Mendoza had to take second place to that.

Will found the diary hard to read: its brittle pages flaked and chipped as he turned them, and Thaddius Riker’s handwriting was cramped and spidery. Sometimes blotches of water, ink, or something that Will thought might be blood obscured words or even whole sections. But even so, no matter where he dipped in, he found himself lost in his ancestor’s exploits, and only occasional mental images of Felicia’s radiant smile or the way her strong body filled out her Academy uniform could haul him back to the twenty-fourth century. For the past couple of days he had been turning to the diary as often as he could make the time, in between classes, other work, and little bits of social time.

William Sherman had been the kind of general Will could appreciate, and there were times, reading about “Uncle Billy,” that he wondered if his own parents had named him for Thaddius’s friend. After taking Atlanta, Sherman had chased General Hood around the South for a while. Tiring of that exercise, he had returned to his original plan for after Atlanta’s defeat—the march to Savannah. He moved in the exact opposite direction from Hood, leading his sixty-two thousand troops toward the sea. He left behind him all sources of supplies and communication—completely on his own, behind enemy lines, but with the intention of routing the enemy and showing them why it was a bad idea to continue fighting. All the way across Georgia they marched, torching fields, killing stock, liberating slaves, and generally making Confederate sympathizers curse Sherman’s name for years to come. The plan was reckless, foolish, utterly wrongheaded, and absolutely the right thing to do.

Thaddius Riker, at the head of the New York 102nd, was with Sherman for the whole thing. They had fought through the hills and forests of northern Georgia together; before and after taking Atlanta they had fought at Kennesaw Mountain and Allatoona and Rome. Thaddius Riker had taken a minié ball in the shoulder at a battle in a place called Pine Mountain, and had fallen, inside Confederate territory. Only the aid of a mysterious stranger helped him get back behind Federal lines, probably saving his life. “I had never seen this fellow before,” Thaddius had written. “But he came along at just the moment when I needed someone. Without him, I would not be here writing these words today. Later I tried to find him agin, to thank him, but he had vanished back into whatever regiment he came from. Whoever he may be, I owe my life to him, and he has my thanks forever.”

But it was near another small town called Garner’s Ridge that Thaddius showed his own strategic thinking.

Cut off from supply lines, Sherman’s men had to live off the land. As Sherman pointed out, if millions of Southerners could do it, his force of several thousand could too. But it meant raiding farmhouses, barnyards, and fields as well as hunting native animals. As an additional benefit, any crops or livestock the Union Army didn’t leave behind was food the Confederate Army couldn’t eat when they came in pursuit.

To further that end, Sherman sent his troops on foraging missions as they cut their swath to the sea. These foragers had express orders not to loot or pillage civilian homes, but to cause as much damage as they could to supply depots or arms warehouses, to put the torch to crops, to free slaves and to supply the Federals whenever possible. According to Thaddius’s diary, these orders were frequently ignored. “I seen three boys come around the bend this morning,” he scrawled at one point. “One wore a long white dress with bows and a bustle, over his uniform, with necklaces that looked like gold tied around his head. The next had outfitted himself with a fine beaver top hat and a gentleman’s coat. The last one was covered in muck, and held a squealing baby pig in his arms.”

Thaddius himself, it seemed, had taken Sherman’s instructions to heart. He kept the New York 102nd in line and under control. Outside the tiny town of Garner’s Ridge, he had led a foraging party of seven, trusted men all. They had come across a large, wealthy plantation, with manicured fields and lawns surrounding an enormous white house. As the men approached the farmhouse, a blonde woman who Old Iron Boots described as “a natural Southern beautey” stepped onto the wide porch with a rifle in her hands, pointing it at the men.

“I reckon you gentlemen are lost,” she said bravely. “Y’all are in the Confederacy now, and those blue coats are not very popular.”

“No, ma’am,” Jim Railsback, a sergeant in Thaddius Riker’s regiment replied. “We ain’t lost at all. It’s just that the Confederacy is shrinking around you.”

“Well, this plantation is still a part of it, and I would appreciate it if you all were on your way.”

“We can’t do that, ma’am,” Thaddius said. “We need to have us a look around, see if you have any provisions here that we can use. General Sherman’s army is a hungry one, ma’am. We won’t come in your house or cause you any grief, we can avoid it, but if you’ve got a smokehouse or anything in your bam we’ll find it and help ourselves. You try to use that rifle you’ll find yourself asking for a lot of trouble you don’t want.”

Thaddius believed she was thinking it over, but then another soldier, called only Frankie in the diary, shouted, “Window, sir!”

Guns were drawn and pointed at a downstairs window, where Thaddius saw only a fluttering of curtain. “Who’s inside, ma’am? Soldiers? Children?”

“My children are soldiers,” the woman said, and now Thaddius could see that she was older than he had thought at first, but still trim and attractive. “Fifteen and nineteen, and if they don’t beat you, their children will.”

“You really think the war’s goin’ to last that long?” Railsback asked.

“Never mind that,” Thaddius Riker snapped. “Who’s inside the house? Speak up or we’ll have to go in and see for ourselves.”

The woman shrugged. “It’s just the darkies,” she said. “They’re hiding from you too. They’ve heard that y’all are tools of the devil, and it’s the gospel truth.”

Even as she spoke, though, the door opened behind her and Thaddius saw a black man step onto the porch. He was nervous, glancing at the Union soldiers and then at the ground, afraid to meet anyone’s eye. “Lucius,” the woman said. “Get back in the house and make sure the others do too.”

But Lucius ignored her command and came down the stairs, past his mistress and toward Thaddius. He was barefoot, and his pants and shirt had been patched so many times it was hard to tell what color they’d originally been. “Y’all are real,” he said. “I been told I’d see devils in blue coats for so long I was expectin’ horns and tails. But you men, you look like God’s own angels to me. Are y’all men or angels?”

“We’re men,” Thaddius said. “Just men who are tired and hungry and trying to live through this damn war. Is there anyone else in the house?”

“My family, sir,” Lucius said. “My wife and our baby. Rest is in the pen, ’round back.”

“No more white men, no soldiers?”

“No, sir. Miz Lily’s husband was killed, and her boys are off with General Hood, hear tell. Ain’t been around in some weeks.”

“And there are more slaves, in a pen, you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Show me. You have a problem with that, ma’am?”

“Besides the fact that y’all are interfering with my private property?” she countered.

“Where I’m standing, old Lucius looks like a man,” Thaddius said. “You’re going to have to get over the idea that men are property you can buy and sell.”

She shifted the rifle in her grasp. “Not as long as I draw breath.”

“You’d best put down that gun,” Thaddius said. “Or you won’t have to worry about breathing for much longer. I told you we’re not here to hurt you or your kin, or damage your house. But we can’t hold with keeping human beings in a pen.”

“If I had a dog I suppose you’d take that too.”

“That would depend on the dog,” Railsback offered helpfully. “Yesterday we shot a hound that was used for tracking escaped slaves.”

“Y’all killed old Clarence?” Lucius asked, breaking into a grin for the first time. He displayed a ragged scar on his calf. “I wisht I’d’a been there for that. Dog has left his mark on me a few times.”

“I don’t know as it was Clarence,” Thaddius said. “But if it wasn’t, we’ll find him too. I’ll even give you the pleasure of pulling the trigger. Now let’s see that pen.”

Miz Lily didn’t stand in their way, so Lucius led the others to a low wooden structure behind the barn. It was unpainted, as if the slaves held inside were even less important than the animals in the neat, whitewashed barn. When Railsback broke off the padlock on the door and Lucius pulled it open, the stink washed over Thaddius like a wave. Inside, there were nineteen slaves, men, women, and children, in a space that might have accommodated six. They had wooden pails for toilets, a barrel with some water in it, and straw for beds. The men had been tied to beams with leather straps.

“These kind gentlemen is here to free us,” Lucius said. “Miz Lily don’t want none of it, but they won’t back down from her. It was a sight, I’ll tell you.”

The people inside burst into laughter and thanks, and some even began to cry, pray, or both. Children ran out into the yard and dashed in wild circles, exuberant at being let out of the pen without a chore assigned to them. One of the women told Lucius that she’d go into the big house to get his family out. He warned her to be careful of Miz Lily, but Frankie volunteered to go along to make sure she didn’t try anything.

“Where we gone go, suh?” one of the women asked Thaddius.

“Anywhere you want, I reckon,” he told her with a grin.

“Ain’t got nowhere special in mind,” she said. “But most places we go, someone will just catch us up again.”

“But you’re free now,” he said.

“You think so, and I might think so,” the woman argued. “Are most other folks in these parts gone think so?”

“I see your point,” Thaddius admitted. This had become a problem already—freed slaves, with no place better to go and no guarantee of safety anywhere in Georgia, had taken to following Sherman’s army around. But that meant more mouths to feed, slower progress, and more targets for Johnny Reb. There was no good solution to the problem, but Thaddius didn’t feel right about turning these people away now that he’d rescued them from a slave pen. “I reckon you can stay with us awhile if you’ve a mind to.”

The slave pen had been put to the torch and the smokehouse raided for stores of beef and pork. Livestock was shot and fire set to the edges of the fields and then, with twenty-two former slaves in tow, the foragers went to rejoin their regiment.

The trouble started on a wooden bridge over a slow, narrow river. From a copse of trees on the far side, shots rang out, and Private Joyce, one of Thaddius Riker’s men, was hit in the gut. He fell, and the rest flattened themselves, drawing their weapons. Thaddius waved the ex-slaves down. But then gunfire came from behind them, up a hillside that banked down toward the river.

“They got us pinned down here,” Railsback muttered. “It’ll be like target practice for ’em to pick us off.”

“That’s because we’re on the wrong side of the bridge,” Thaddius said.

“But they’re on both sides!”

“I’m talking about over and under,” Thaddius explained. “We’re over. We need to be under. Give ’em some hell, boys!” he shouted. “And let’s get wet!”

The men all started shooting then, setting up a covering barrage that drove the rebs back into the trees and those up on the hill into hiding while the Federals dove from the bridge into the lazily moving river. The water wasn’t very deep and the men were able to keep their guns and powder above its surface. In the shade of the bridge, they were at least somewhat protected from those on the hill, and the cut of the riverbank kept those in the trees from being able to see them, much less shoot them. But when the freed slaves joined them under the bridge, it became crowded, and the soldiers on the hill were able to pick off the people around the edges. Two of the slaves were hit, and Frankie took a ball in the shoulder, shattering bone and spraying blood into the water.

Thaddius knew this was only a temporary measure. They couldn’t stay in this water indefinitely, and the bridge would only offer protection for so long. It was just wood and eventually the Confederate shot would chew through it. Besides, when the men from the trees came to the river’s edge they’d be easy targets. He needed a plan, and he needed it fast.

“How many men you think they have?” he asked Railsback.

“Can’t be too many. We didn’t think they had any forces around here. My guess is this is a small patrol that spotted us and thought they’d make some trouble. A dozen, maybe, six in the trees and six up top.”

“That’s what I’m thinking too,” Thaddius said. “Which means they still outnumber us two to one and have the tactical advantage.”

“Unless you count the Negroes,” Railsback pointed out.

“They don’t have guns, but I was just getting to that,” Thaddius said. “How well can you swim?”

“I swim fine, I guess. What do you have in mind, sir?”

“Well, when we go underwater our rifles won’t do us any good. So we leave them behind with whatever of those slaves can shoot, and we just take bayonets.”

“Bayonets, sir? Against a dozen men? Or what we hope is only a dozenmen?”

“I know the odds aren’t great,” Thaddius Riker said with a smile. “But that’s their own fault for joining the Confederate Army.”

He recruited another soldier and three of the strongest, healthiest former slaves, including Lucius. Each man was assigned a bayonet, and a secondary hunting knife. Rifles were left with those who would stay behind. At Thaddius’s signal, the little force under the bridge began firing up the hill, distracting the rebels up there, and Thaddius, Railsback, Clancy, and three ex-slaves dove under the water, swimming for all they were worth. They swam underneath until their lungs were fit to burst, then came up close to the near bank, where they hoped the men up the hill wouldn’t be able to see them. Then they ducked under again, and swam another distance downriver. Finally, they dragged themselves out and up the bank, dripping, cold, and weighted down with all the water they’d taken on.

Thaddius led the men by example and hand signal. They climbed up the far side of the hill, and within a short while were slipping down behind the armed rebels, who had taken up positions behind large rocks and downed trees. But those bulwarks protected them only from bullets fired from below. At Thaddius’s signal, his tiny force attacked. There were eight rebels, not six. One of them got off a shot, which tore through the wrist of one of the ex-slaves. But the bayonets did their dirty work, and in a few short moments the Confederates were all on the ground, bleeding into the dirt.

The wounded slave grinned at Thaddius in spite of his injury. “I ain’t had so much fun in years,” he said. “Y’all get to do this every day?”

“Not quite like this,” Thaddius replied. “But if you can handle a gun as well as you do that bayonet you might could find a place in this army.”

“Be a little tricky with but one wing,” the man said. “But I’ll gladly give it a try.” He took a musket from one of the Confederate corpses and balanced it on a boulder, sighting down it toward the copse of trees. As Thaddius had hoped, the rebs there had grown restless and were creeping toward the riverbank, where they figured they would have easy pickings at those stuck in the water.

“Let’s see what you can do,” Thaddius urged. He helped himself to a gun and the other men did the same. The former slave fired first, and his target dropped. The others began firing, and the Confederates, all in the open now, were disposed of quickly. By the time Thaddius and his men came down from the hill, the rest of the Federals and freed slaves were out of the water, wringing out their clothes, stamping their feet, and helping themselves to weapons and ammunition from the rebel corpses.

Will Riker liked the tale because it demonstrated a trait that Thaddius Riker had in common with William Tecumseh Sherman, and one that he hoped he had as well—the ability to look unconventionally at a difficult situation and find a unique solution. Most leaders wouldn’t have abandoned their guns and attacked a larger force with lesser weapons. But without that creative response, the story of Thaddius Riker might well have ended in that cold, slow Georgia creek near Garner’s Ridge.

Maybe that was what he needed with Felicia, he realized. The two had talked for hours the other night, after they had made their peace. Since then he had seen her a couple more times, but usually in groups. They had touched a few times, hands coming together, but there had been little forward progress in the direction that Will had decided he wanted to go. He still didn’t know if it was what Felicia wanted, but he was more convinced than ever that it might be. He just needed to find out. And since he didn’t know quite how to go about it, he needed a creative way to force the issue.