Текст книги "Deny Thy Father"

“No,” he managed. “Because if I was, then I wouldn’t be in pain. Feeling no pain, that’s what they say, right?”

“Sometimes they do,” she agreed. “But you’re feeling it now, aren’t you?”

He tried to push himself to a sitting position. It didn’t work very well. He reached out and steadied himself against her bed and did it again, and this time he was able to sit up, as long as he leaned against the bed. His head throbbed blindingly and his stomach churned. “Yes,” he admitted. “I’m feeling it.”

“You do know where you are?”

“I’m in your room. I came here ... to talk to you.”

“You didn’t seem interested in talking. Snoring, maybe.”

“I’m sorry, Felicia,” he said. “I hope I didn’t keep you up.”

“After you woke me up in the first place, you mean.”

“Sorry about that too,” he said. The words were coming a little easier, but some water would make it easier still. She had already figured that out, it seemed, and she brought him a glass.

“You’re dehydrated,” she said. “You need to drink this. Slowly and carefully.”

He took a sip and felt his stomach lurch. He waited for it to settle, then took another sip. “I really messed everything up,” he said. “I am so sorry.”

“You’re a Starfleet Academy cadet,” Felicia said with a shrug. “It’s practically a graduating requirement.”

“You hardly ever mess up.”

“I am unique in my brilliance and self-possession,” she said, laughing.

“That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.” Will drank some more water and felt a little stronger.

“If you came to compliment my good qualities, I’m sorry you were unconscious the whole time,” Felicia replied. “But now I have to get to class—as do you, although I doubt you’ll make it. So we’ll have to reschedule my praise.”

“But ... no, Felicia.” He forced himself to his feet, made it for a second and then fell back to the edge of her bed. Progress, though. “You know what? I’ve put this off too long. I know I’ve blown it, probably ruined whatever chance I might ever have had. But I still have to say it. So stick around, please. For a little while.”

“Will, this class is important to me.”

“But you’reimportant to me!” There,he thought. It’s out.

“I appreciate that, Will,” she said, apparently not quite getting what he’d meant. “And I like you too. But I don’t want to miss this class.”

“Felicia,” Will said, hanging his head and gripping it with both hands as if to keep its halves together. His outburst had been truly excruciating. “Just ... wait. Bear with me a little, okay? We’ve known each other for a long time.”

“Yes, we have.” She sat down on a chair facing him and waited. “So what did you want to talk about?”

“This made a lot more sense last night,” he began. “Or at least I thought it did. But ... well, us. I wanted to talk about us.”

“There’s an us?”

“I always wanted there to be,” Will said. “I guess after last night, I can see that there never will be. But as long as I’ve known you I’ve wanted to be with you.”

“And of course I was supposed to know this by the fact that you never once mentioned it.”

“Yes,” Will said. Then, “No. I mean ... you couldn’t have, I guess. I kept hoping you would just figure it out. And I wanted to tell you, several times. But things kept getting in the way.”

“What kinds of things?” she asked him. She seemed a little dismayed by this whole conversation, and he couldn’t blame her a bit.

“Different ... things. Like when we were on our survival project, I wanted to say something. But we ended up being arrested and sent to Superintendent Vyrek’s office, and by the time I got out, you were already gone.”

“I waited for you to come out,” Felicia corrected him. “But it took so long, and the others were leaving. And then when you did come out, you went the other direction. You didn’t even try to catch up to us.”

“I thought if you wanted me around, you’d wait,” he said. “I guess maybe I was wrong.”

“Maybe,” she echoed, nodding her head.

“And then, on the moon. After that dinner, remember? I wanted to take you out under the stars and tell you then. But you went out with Estresor Fil instead. And after that, it seemed like you two were doing so well together, I didn’t want to get in the way.”

“Estresor Fil is sweet and kind and was gutsy enough to say what she felt,” Felicia told him. “Which you’re a couple of years late with. We’ve had some good times, she and I. We enjoy each other’s company. We like to be together. But what we have isn’t a romance, and it won’t ever be.”

“I thought ...”

“I know what you thought, Will. Or I think I do. I also think you’re emotionally stunted. You don’t know what you want, and once you figure that out you don’t know how to pursue it.”

“I thought we were here to talk about your qualities, not mine,” he said with a weak grin.

“There’s a time for everything, Will,” she shot back. “You’re making me miss my class, I get to tell you how I feel. Fair’s fair.”

“Okay,” Will relented. “Go ahead. Let me have it. I deserve it, I know.”

She took to her feet again, as if this would be easier standing up, and started pacing before him. “Will, you’re a nice guy. You’re smart, you’re funny, you’re frequently very sweet. You’re easy to look at. I like you a lot. But you’re so dense sometimes I can’t stand it.”

Will knew he was opening himself up, but he had to ask. “Dense?”

Felicia laughed so hard she actually snorted. Will would have enjoyed it if the sound didn’t make his head hurt so much. When she had composed herself, she wiped a tear away with the back of her hand and stood in front of him. “Look at me, Will. Am I unattractive?”

“Not at all,” he answered truthfully. “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever known.”

“Do I have any kind of objectionable odor? Any unsanitary or unsightly habits you know of?”

“Besides the snorting thing when you laugh?” he teased. “Of course not.”

“So it’s safe to assume that if I had wanted a boyfriend or a girlfriend during my time here at the Academy, I could probably have had one.”

“I suppose.”

“Especially since I’m not too emotionally naïve to go out and look for one, if that’s what I wanted.”

“You could put it that way,” Will admitted.

“And yet I don’t,” she pointed out.

“No, you don’t seem to. Not if Estresor Fil doesn’t count.”

“She doesn’t count.”

“Then I guess the answer is that you don’t. What was the question again?”

She lowered herself to her knees, now, in front of Will, and put her hands on his knees, looking right into his eyes. “The question, Will Riker, is just how long did you expect me to wait around for you?”

“For me?”

“Did I say ‘dense’?” Felicia asked, smacking his knees with her palms. “I meant impenetrable! The planet’s crust isn’t as thick as you, Riker!”

“Wait,” he said, slowly catching up. “You were waiting for me?”

Felicia covered her face with her hands. “Just don’t ask me why!”

“But that means ... you ...”

She pushed herself up on his knees again, bringing her face level with his. “I’m crazy about you, Will. I always have been. But you kept walling yourself off, closing yourself away from me. You hid from me for, what was it, six months? I would have said something but I knew you weren’t ready. I had to wait until you could make up your own mind, or you’d spend the rest of your life wondering if I’d pushed you into something. I wonder if there’s a Starfleet medal for extreme patience in the face of idiocy.”

A sudden vision of Trinidad clinking glasses with him at the bar flashed into Will’s mind. “Oh, no,” he said. “Speaking of pushing people into things ... oh, no.”

“What is it, Will?”

He held her face between his palms. “I’ve got to find Trinidad Khalil,” he said urgently. “And then I’ve got to go to Saturn.”

“Today? You’re leaving today?”

“If they haven’t left without me,” Will said. “Oh, no.”

“Will, what is it?”

“Just another bad mistake in a whole series of them,” he told her. He pulled her face closer and pressed his lips against hers. He liked the way that felt, a lot, and he did it again. “You’ve waited this long, you can wait a few more days, right?”

“I guess so, Will, but ...”

“I need to go.” He kissed her again, twice, then twice more. “I really need to go.” He kissed her one more time. “I’m going now.”

“Will, if it’s that important,” she said, her lips caught under his, “then you should really go. I’ll be here.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

Will caught Trinidad as he was leaving his room, his duffel packed for the trip to the Saturn base. “Trinidad,” he said, breathlessly. “You can’t do this!”

Trinidad eyed him. “You look awful, Will. What happened to you?”

“I know,” Will assured him. “I slept on a floor. But I feel wonderful.”

“What do you mean, I can’t do this? Last night you were trying to make me think it was my idea. Almost worked, too.”

“Look,” Will said. “There’s a certain diabolical cleverness to the idea. But it’s doomed to fail. Everyone knows you’re not me. Someone would accidentally call you Trinidad in front of the instructors and it would all be over. Or they’d call out ‘Will’ and you’d forget to answer. Or there would be a DNA scan or a retina scan at some point. There are too many ways for it to go wrong, don’t you see? If we got caught—and we would—we’d both be in serious trouble.” Will had had enough close scrapes at the Academy. If a Starfleet officer broke the rules with a good enough reason, that was one thing. But before he actually got into Starfleet, he knew it was important to play it safe—or he might find himself out before he ever got in.

“But ... you wanted it,” Trinidad said. He sounded mournful, and Will was sorry he’d ever brought it up. Trinidad loved to fly more than anything, and this must have seemed like the adventure of a lifetime.

“I know. I would love to stay and see Spock. But I can’t, and you can’t go to Saturn. You’re just third year, though, and already a better pilot than me. You’ll go next year, for sure.”

“You think so?” Trinidad asked, brightening a little.

“Definitely,” Will said. “I know it.”

“Well, if you’re going,” Trinidad suggested, “you’d better hustle. The shuttle’s leaving in twenty minutes.”

Will groaned. He had known it was late, but he hadn’t realized it was that late. “Give me your duffel,” he said.

“What?”

“Your duffel. You don’t need it. We wear the same size uniform. I don’t have time to pack.”

“Are you sure you’ve sobered up?” Trinidad asked him.

“I’m as sober as I need to be,” Will said. “Come on, quick. I need to go.”

Trinidad shrugged and handed over his duffel. “Have a good trip,” he said. “Don’t drink the Aldorian ale.”

“Never again,” Will promised him.

Borrowed duffel in hand, Will turned and dashed toward the lift. Less than twenty minutes to make the shuttle. With every step he ran, his head pounded, like someone opening and closing a vise on it.

And yet, in a different way, he had never felt better.

Chapter 23

Cyre was governed by a ruling council made up of seven members, each representing a different geographical region of the nation. Cozzen was in the largest region, an inland area dominated by that city. There were also two coastal areas, a mountain region, and three smaller inland areas, all making up a nation that was more or less rectangular, bounded on the north and west by seas, on the south by an enemy, and on the east by two separate but allied smaller states. The council members purported to represent the entire population of each region, so that the whole council would support the interests of the nation.

It didn’t work that way, Kyle had learned.

Instead, the council members really represented a small minority of the wealthiest and most powerful citizens in each region. New council members were chosen by existing council members, for terms, of nine Hazimotian years, so there was little chance of anyone who genuinely represented the population finding a seat at the council. Each council member also served as the chief executive officer of his or her region, with another, similarly chosen council at that level under his or her rule.

The main function of the council seemed to be—at least as Michelle and her friends described it—the raising of revenue through taxes, various fees, and fines for criminal behavior. That revenue, however, rarely came back to the citizens in the form of services, but instead seemed to be spent on a never-ending litany of important government contracts—awarded to council members and their allies, of course—that rarely had any real impact on the nation. At the local level, at least, some of the money eventually filtered down, as Kyle had learned. He’d been employed since arriving on Hazimot as a laborer for a perpetual series of municipal repairs. But the money budgeted toward those repairs seemed to be many times what went out in salaries and materials, so it was obvious that the local councilors were padding their pocketbooks the whole time.

The public, squeezed from the top and with no relief in sight, began to object, and so the fires of discontent spread. But the council, isolated from its populace, remained ignorant of how fast and wide their actions fanned those flames. And the population as a whole, though embittered and impoverished by the council’s decisions, didn’t know the full extent of their own unhappiness. Public displays of dissent were banned, the press strictly controlled. There are enemies at our borders, the council said. We’ll take care of you, but you have to be silent and let us do our jobs.

What the revolution needed was a public action, a Boston Tea Party, a storming of the Bastille, a barrage of Station Salem One. Something to show the nation that there was an opposition, that it was organized and strong and determined.

That’s where Kyle came in.

He sat with Michelle and her friends, with Cetra and Roog and Melinka, with Alan and Jackdaw and Baukels Jinython, and with the others who formed the extended planning leadership of Cozzen’s revolutionary cadre. From other cities, including the Cyrian capital of Coscotus on the northern shore, others came. They met, they ate and drank, they talked incessantly. Proposals were put forth, debated, and usually discarded. Others were massaged and kept for further consideration. With Michelle vouching for him, Kyle was accepted into the highest levels of the group. He appreciated the intent of their effort but he was not, by nature, a political activist, and he served as a kind of devil’s advocate for them, poking holes in their ideas to see where the air leaked out.

Finally, the time came to put talk aside and take direct action. Their first attack was meant to be primarily one of public relations, not military. Too many of Cyre’s vast underclass had already died in combat, drafted and sent to battle the unending supply of enemies in other lands. The goal was to oust the council with the least amount of military action, the fewest deaths. But that could happen only if an overwhelming number of the nation’s populace rose up at once.

Mahaross Ka Elstreth was the council member for Cozzen, and on this day he was in the city, officiating over the induction of Cozzen’s newest councilor, his third son, Mahaross Ka Ennis. A parade was planned, and spontaneous displays of patriotic pride were not only encouraged, but had in fact been orchestrated in advance by commercial allies of the councilors. A great many citizens would be watching, and the day’s events would be broadcast live throughout Cozzen and across the land. Two of Elstreth’s fellow council members would also be on hand to greet his son into the ranks of privilege.

The parade would not, if Michelle’s friends had their way, go precisely as expected.

On the day of the action, Michelle dressed quickly, anxious to get into position. But when Kyle tried to follow her out the door she pushed him back into a chair, palms flat against his chest, head wagging. “No,” she said. “You stay here. This isn’t your fight and you can’t get involved.”

He had to laugh. “Seems like I’m already pretty involved.”

“Among those of us on the committee,” she pointed out. “But not on the streets. The rest of them, the people who will be doing the dirty work, don’t know you—they don’t know anyone by name, so if any of them are arrested they can’t implicate anyone on the committee. We’ve all used noms de guerre.”

“That’s a good idea,” Kyle said. He knew that she had met with various planning committees while he worked—that while he had helped with the broad strokes planning, he hadn’t been around for much of the detail work. “But still, if you’re going to be out there I want to be next to you.”

Michelle shook her head again. “Absolutely not. Probably nothing will happen to me, and I’ll see you when it’s over and make passionate love with you. If, on the other hand, something does happen, the movement will need your skills to carry on.”

“My skills only go so far without someone like you to put my plans into action,” Kyle protested.

“Exactly my point,” Michelle said. “Someone needs to put this into action, and that’s me. If you object to me going out and acting, then we’ve got a problem.”

Kyle could see that arguing with her was going to be fruitless. In fact, he realized, in all the planning for today’s activities he had never been assigned a specific role. He’d thought that he would simply be accompanying Michelle, but now he realized it was because she knew he would object if she let him know ahead of time that he was being left behind. “All right,” he said, giving in for now. Another thing he knew was that when Michelle had made up her mind there was no budging her. “But you be careful.”

“Don’t worry,” Michelle promised him. “I love you too much to not come straight back here when it’s over.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Kyle said. “And watching.”

“You do that.” Michelle kissed him several times, and then dashed out the door, her face flushed with the excitement of the day. Kyle felt a surge of disappointment that he wasn’t going with her, combined with worry that he wouldn’t be around to watch her back. But the plan was for a nonviolent action today, more street theater than revolution, so there shouldn’t be much danger.

In a way, this was what Kyle was used to. In his Starfleet role, he was the adviser, the civilian who stayed back while others executed his plans. He had, he was fully aware, been responsible for the deaths of thousands, over the span of his career—Starfleet personnel as well as aliens he would never meet or even see in person. It wasn’t something he thought about very often, because it was a difficult burden to bear. Because he was good at compartmentalizing, that was an aspect of his life that he kept tucked away and didn’t take out to examine very often. When he did, he just accepted that it ran in his family.

His father had been a military man, as had his grandfather. His grandfather, he remembered with displeasure, had also been a tyrant at home, a martinet, running his household as he would have a starship if he’d ever held a command position. But probably because of his violent temper he never was put in charge of troops, so he had taken his aggressions out on his family instead. As the oldest son, Kyle’s father was first in line when his purple rages came upon him.

Kyle’s father, in his turn, had sworn never to lay a hand on his family in anger, and had kept that vow. From his military service he took a different lesson, that of self-discipline, of keeping his emotions in check, of leading the fragmented unit of his family into functioning as a whole. Kyle had, he hoped, put more of his father’s lessons into practice than his grandfather’s. To a certain extent, he supposed, he was genetically doomed to a military career and all the attendant difficulties. There had been very few generations of Rikers, as far back as he’d been able to research, that hadn’t included soldiers. And while, of course, not every military person had emotional problems, he guessed there was probably some correlation. The traits that made for a good soldier—the ability to follow orders, to sublimate the individual for the unit, to kill without undue anguish—didn’t necessarily lend themselves well to getting along in a domestic situation. Will—poor, innocent Will—had had to pay that price as well, and that, as much as losing Annie and letting Kate go, was the central heartbreak of Kyle Riker’s life. He didn’t want to let it happen again, ever.

After a quick dash through the hot, dusty morning streets, Michelle met her unit at a designated spot near the fringes of The End. Those who were taking part in today’s parade disruption had split into nine teams of seven each. Michelle’s unit consisted of six people she’d never met before, who knew her only by her nom de guerreof Kyle Riker, which-she had taken in honor of the man who had done more for her, in a relatively short span of time, than all the men she had ever known. He’d inspired her, he’d guided and encouraged her activism, he’d offered brilliant strategic advice, and he had touched her, emotionally and physically, in ways she hadn’t believed she could be touched. The strangest part was, he seemed almost totally oblivious to it all, as if he couldn’t quite believe he offered all these gifts and kept wondering what hook it was that kept her near him.