Текст книги "Deny Thy Father"

Автор книги: Jeff Mariotte

Соавторы: Jeff Mariotte
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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Chapter 31

“I’ve known you a long time, Owen,” Kyle said. “You’ve always been straight with me. That’s why I’ve come to you now. No matter what’s going on, I can’t believe you’re involved.”

Owen Paris looked at Kyle, his mouth still agape, eyes wide, and shook his head slowly. “You can’t believe?” he replied. “I can’t believe you’re standing there. It’s been two years, hasn’t it?”

“A little more,” Kyle admitted. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before, Owen. I didn’t know who to trust. I was scared. Not in my right mind, I guess.”

Owen turned his gaze toward the top of his desk. “I thought you were dead, Kyle. I think after a while, we all did.”

“Not an entirely inappropriate conclusion, considering someone was trying awfully hard to kill me.”

“So it seemed,” Owen said. “And then you vanished. What else were we to think? We tried to find you—Starfleet Security was knocking on doors and interviewing people all over the place. But you were simply gone. Where were you? Where have you been all this time?”

“That’s not important now, Owen. It was a bad place, and I lost someone I cared about there. Tell you the truth, I’m still grieving for her. But I’m back now, and I want to get to the bottom of this thing once and for all. I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life, wondering who the next killer is. And I’d like for the rest of my life to last more than just a few days.”

“We all would,” Owen assured him. “I know Starfleet investigated the attempts on your life, the ones we knew about, anyway, for a while. But they didn’t turn anything up, and then you were gone, so I think the investigation petered out after a while. No body, no evidence, no witnesses. It’s still an open file, I’m sure, but with nothing to go on, they had to give up the hunt at some point.”

Kyle had contacted Owen’s office shortly after landing in San Francisco. He’d been nervous about approaching Starfleet Command, and after trying to think of a safe way to approach, had finally sent a message to Owen asking him to meet at the wharf. Kyle had arrived a little early, and the ten minutes or so he’d had to wait for Owen to show up had been anxious ones—hoping Owen, and he alone, had received the message and would comply. Now they stood on the wharf in gathering fog, looking out at the choppy gray water. “So if they’d like to get busy again, they’re welcome to. As for evidence, I don’t have any more than I did then. But now that I’ve returned, if the attempts start up again there’ll be plenty, I imagine.”

“If the attempts start up again after this long, it means someone really holds a grudge,” Owen said. “You still don’t have any idea who it might be?”

“Not a clue,” Kyle informed him. “Or rather, too many ideas. Anyone in my position has a lot of enemies. Anybody that has been beaten in combat thanks to my advice and strategies. Even other Starfleet personnel who might feel that they were ignored, or passed over, because of me. Sure, I’ve got enemies. I just don’t know who they are.”

“I’ve got to bring security into this,” Owen told him. “I’ll help where I can, but it’s really not my bailiwick.”

“I know that, Owen,” Kyle replied. “I didn’t come to you because I thought you could fix it. I came because you were the one person I was sure I could trust.”

“What was the final straw?” Owen asked him. A hovercraft chugged by on the water before them, bristling with fishing rods. “Was there some incident, some attempt, that prompted you to go into hiding? Maybe they can start there.”

Kyle had to think about it for a moment. So much had happened since then, it was sometimes hard to keep the sequence of events straight in his head. “After the last attack you know about, the bomb transported into my apartment? I was at Starfleet Command, in the infirmary. I ran into a friend, in the hallway, and went into a private room for a moment. While we were there, we heard some security officers outside claiming that they had an arrest warrant for me, and—”

“An arrest warrant?” Owen exploded. He rubbed his smooth forehead vigorously. “How is that possible? What would you have been charged with?”

Kyle shrugged. “Treason, according to Admiral Bonner’s source, right?”

“That’s another investigation that seems to have stalled out,” Owen said. “Again, with you gone, it hardly seemed worth pursuing. I haven’t heard anything about it from Horace.”

“I’d like my name cleared, Owen, if there’s genuinely a question about it.”

“Bonner had a source,” Owen said, his tone dismissive. “His source seemed to have some pretty good information. But the conclusion—that you were somehow responsible for the Tholian attack—seemed exceedingly far-fetched to me.” Owen shook his head. “I guess I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d stayed away forever, considering all the crap you’ve got to put up with here.”

Kyle nodded, reflecting. “I might have,” he answered. “If not for this woman I met. She was amazing, Owen. She would not accept injustice. Just wouldn’t put up with it. Taught me a thing or two, I can tell you. And after I lost her, well, I guess I felt like I ought to carry on her ideals. I could have done it there, where I was—they have a fight on their hands, to be sure. But I realized that this is my home, and that what happened to me here is a form of injustice that I need to deal with before I’ll be any good to anyone else.”

Owen examined him carefully. “So when you solve the situation here, are you going back there? Wherever there is.”

Kyle shrugged. “I don’t know yet. I don’t plan to. But that could change. Plans, I’ve learned, are liquid. They adapt to fit the circumstances, or they’re worthless. More than that, really, because if you rely on a plan that can’t change you might as well have no plan at all.”

Owen Paris chuckled, “Sounds like you’ve become a philosopher since you’ve been gone.”

“I’ve done a lot of thinking. I don’t know if that’s philosophy, or a fool’s errand. But for a long time, I didn’t have much else to do. And then when things happened, they happened all at once. If a cat has nine lives, Owen, then I don’t know how many I’ve got, but I must be just about out of them.”

“We’ll keep your return as quiet as we can, Kyle,” Owen promised him. “Some people will have to know, because, as I said, security is going to have to reopen the investigation. But you watch your step until we figure this thing out.”

“I’ll watch my step,” Kyle said. “But I want to come back to work.”

Owen looked at him like he’d gone insane. Maybe I have,Kyle thought. Maybe insane is the only way to counter insanity.“Back to work? Are you sure? Then it’ll be no secret that you’re back here.”

“That’s right,” Kyle said. “If they’re going to come at me again, whoever they are, I want them to do it in the open. I want everyone to know I’m here. I want to flush them out. If my presence is a secret then any attacks on me will be a secret too. I want to force their hand, make them sweat a bit. They’ll play the cards I deal them this time, and not the other way around.”

Owen shot him a smile, the first Kyle had seen on him since he’d arrived at the wharf to see his long-since vanished friend. “Did you spend your time thinking, or playing cards?” he asked. He put a friendly hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “I don’t necessarily agree with your plan, but I’ll go along with it. You deal the hands; I’ll back your play as best I can. And I’ll make sure my friends in security do the same.”

“I appreciate that, Owen,” Kyle said. “That’s the best I can ask for.”

Lieutenant Commander Dugan glanced up from the computer screen, sleepy-eyed but alert. “There’s no record of any arrest warrant for Kyle Riker, Admiral,” he said. “Not two years ago in June, not ever.”

“I didn’t think so,” Owen Paris said. Kyle had left him at the wharf a couple of hours before, promising to get in touch when he’d found a place to stay in the city. His apartment had long since been occupied; his belongings put into storage. “But I had to check. What about the other thing?”

“That’s a strange one,” Dugan said. He’d been promoted a little more than a year ago, and Owen had absolute faith in his trustworthiness. “A security officer named Romesh McNally was on duty that night. He was approached, he said, by a fellow officer, Carson Cook, to help serve a warrant on Riker. McNally never saw the actual warrant, it turns out. Cook had it, he said, and McNally was just along as backup. They went to the infirmary to serve it. McNally says Cook was acting strangely—fixated on this one task, serving this warrant, and unable or uninterested in engaging in any conversation or activity that was not directly related to the job. It was, McNally says, like he was obsessed with it. McNally describes him as tense, too, as if he expected trouble.”

“Isn’t there always the possibility of trouble when a warrant is being served?” Owen asked him.

Dugan touched his silver hair, smoothing it down even though it wasn’t out of place. “Sure,” he said. “You never know what might happen, what the response might be. You’re tense, ready to go for your sidearm if necessary. But at the same time, in spite of that tension it’s kind of a routine thing. You joke around, you talk about sports, women, whatever. You don’t focus on it like it’s the only thing in the world. Cook was an experienced officer; he had been through it plenty of times. I knew him—not well, but a little. He was a good man.”

“Was?” Owen asked. “Clarify, Commander.”

“Yes, sir,” Dugan said, and Owen realized that he had slipped into admiral mode without even realizing it. “I had only a vague memory of this, but I checked the records. And McNally, of course, remembered it all fairly well, when I interviewed him about it. Both officers showed up for their next shift, after failing to serve the warrant, and McNally had asked Cook what had happened. He assumed that someone else had taken over the warrant, maybe serving Riker at his home or office the next day, or, failing that, if an investigation into Riker’s whereabouts had been launched. But Cook couldn’t remember what he was talking about. He claimed not to know who Kyle Riker was, didn’t recall the trip to the infirmary. It was like the whole event, the whole shift that night, was gone from his memory.”

“That must have been disturbing.”

“I’m sure it was. Nobody’s quite sure if that set off what happened next, or if it was just symptomatic. But Cook’s mind seemed to deteriorate rapidly. Not quite overnight, but according to the records, within weeks his memory was completely gone. Every known therapy was used to try to restore it. Counseling, hypnosis, holotherapy, data extraction. Nothing helped. His mind, again according to the records, had been wiped clean. He couldn’t remember how to pull on a pair of boots. He didn’t know his own name, or recognize his immediate family.”

“I remember the case,” Owen said. “I just didn’t realize it was the same person. Of course, I didn’t know about the ‘warrant’ then, or I might have made the connection.”

“Almost no one knew, except for McNally,” Dugan explained. “He talked about it with a few people, including his immediate superior. But soon enough, Cook’s deterioration overshadowed any puzzle about a nonexistent warrant for a guy no one could find anyway. The mystery of the warrant went into the databanks and was largely forgotten, until you brought it up again today.”

“And the one man who claimed there was a warrant isn’t available to ask about it.”

“You could ask him,” Dugan corrected. “He’s here, in a private care facility in San Francisco. The thing of it is, you just wouldn’t get an answer.”

Ensign Tanguy Messina looked in on his charge several times a day. The poor guy had been Starfleet, just like he was, and even though he could no longer serve, he was still entitled to the respect due the uniform he had once worn. Now he didn’t wear a uniform at all, unless a loose white robe counted. They made sure he was comfortable, at least as far as one could determine the comfort level of a person who couldn’t tell you how he felt. Carson Cook could have stood outside in a blizzard, naked, and except for involuntary responses like shivering and turning blue, he’d have seemed every bit as content as he was inside this temperature-controlled environment with his every physical need catered to. The room was light and airy, the furniture soft and comfortable, and soothing music played in the background. Calming holoimages, rotating at random intervals, were displayed on the walls.

“People asking about you today, Cars,” Ensign Messina said casually. “That doesn’t happen too often anymore, does it? But today, everybody wants to know how you’re doing. Funny, huh?” He watched Carson closely, but there was no evidence that the guy understood a single word he was saying. As usual. He talked to the guy sometimes just because it felt weird not to. He was completely mindless, as far as Messina could tell, but he was still a human being.

“How you doing today?” he continued. “Same as always?”

Carson’s gaze flitted across him as if he wasn’t even there. It was strange, he knew. Modern medical science could cure just about anything, it seemed. He knew that historically, mental health care had been largely hit-and-miss. Some people could be put right again, others suffered forever, their conditions sometimes mitigated by drugs, talk therapy, electroshock, or other treatments. Messina had made a study of the dysfunctions of the mind, and he volunteered at this care facility, which had only the occasional “hopeless” case, where in centuries past it had been full to overflowing, while he worked on his medical training as a graduate student at the Academy.

He had glanced away from Carson, but when he looked back, it seemed as if something had changed. Maybe a little tensing of the muscles, which was rare. Carson sat in a chair most of the time; though he was capable of almost full mobility, he just didn’t seem to have anywhere he wanted to go. He was in that chair now, but he seemed a little more wound up than he had been just a moment before, almost coiled. And his eye movements were different. Rather than drifting aimlessly about the room, they seemed to dart.

This was definitely a change, Messina realized. He had to alert the director. Something was going on with Carson Cook, and that had never happened. He started for the door.

“Wait,” he heard.

He didn’t recognize Carson’s voice because Carson had never spoken, not in the whole time he’d been cared for here. But the room was otherwise empty; there was no one else it could have been. Messina turned around, and Carson was trying to get out of the chair. His muscles, atrophied by inactivity, didn’t seem to be cooperating. “I ... can’t ...” he muttered.

Messina rushed to help him. “Carson, hold on. Don’t push it,” he said. “Let me—”

As soon as he was close, Carson lunged from the chair, no atrophied muscles holding him back at all. He caught the unsuspecting Messina in a headlock, powerful arms encircling Messina’s throat. Messina tried to cry out an alarm but he couldn’t make a sound. He felt Carson’s arms shifting, and then his world turned black.

Carson dropped the red-shirted man on the floor, his neck snapped. That was not the man he wanted, he knew. That was just a man who was in his way. The man he wanted was in the city, though. Not far away. He would find that man, the one he wanted, and he would snap his neck too. Or do something else; he would decide when he found him. The means wasn’t important. It was the goal he cared about.

The man was in the city, at last, and the man had to die.

Chapter 32

“Ahead warp five,” Captain Pressman instructed.

“Ahead warp five,” Ensign Riker echoed. He touched the control panel and imagined he could feel the burst of speed, the g-forces pressing him into his seat, as the Pegasusaccelerated dramatically. It really was just his imagination. The g-force of a warp five acceleration would smear everyone on the bridge against the rear bulkhead if it could truly be felt, and those who were standing remained in place, just fine, even as the stars outside seemed to blur and stretch. He remembered a tidbit of old Earth history, at the advent of railroads; some people believed that trains would never work because at the speed they hurtled along nobody would be able to stand up.

After a few days of slow and steady progress into space, this was the first time they had traveled at warp, and Will couldn’t help being excited. Space travel had already begun to feel routine to him. He realized he wasn’t the most patient guy in the world, but he’d started to wonder when something would happen. Then, today, it had.

Captain Pressman had received a call that he’d taken in his ready room, and when he’d come back onto the bridge, his entire attitude had changed. He was brisk and efficient at the best of times, but now he was all business. “We’ve been sent on an emergency mission,” he said. “Go to yellow alert, full enable status.”

“Is there a threat, sir?” Marc Boylen asked.

“Not that we know of,” the captain answered. “Yet. But there will be.” He turned his attention to Will. “Set a course for Candelar IV, Mr. Riker.”

Will had relayed that instruction to the ship’s computer, which had set the course automatically. Then Captain Pressman had dictated the speed, and Will knew that this really was a matter of some urgency. Warp five was somewhere around a hundred times the speed of light, a concept that simply boggled Will’s mind when he really thought about it. Warp technology was a fact of life, and always had been. But the idea that he, a kid from Valdez, would be at the conn of a spacecraft traveling so fast that if he’d been watching it from Prince William Sound would have been gone before he could even see it, was hard to imagine.

And yet, here he was. Traveling at warp five to a destination he’d never even heard of, much less considered visiting. He wanted to know why they were headed to Candelar IV in such a rush, but he didn’t want to be the one to ask.

Finally, though, Commander Barry Chamish did. “What’s the emergency, Captain?” he wondered.

“It seems that Endyk Plure has been captured,” Pressman said simply.

“ TheEndyk Plure?” Marc Boylen asked. “Wanted for war crimes on at least a half dozen planets?”

“That’s the one, Mr. Boylen,” Pressman replied. “Hundreds of thousands dead, thanks to his predacity. At a bare minimum. On worlds throughout the Candelar system.”

“Sounds like a good thing to me,” Barry said.

“It is a very good thing,” Pressman agreed. “But the Federation wants him to stand trial in a Federation court. They want the trial to be fair and above reproach.”

“They don’t believe he’ll get a fair trial there?” Shinnareth Bestor asked from ops.

“They don’t believe he’ll live to see his trial date,” Pressman said. “He’s being held at the most secure facility on Candelar IV. But there are already mobs surrounding the prison, calling for his head. It’s positively medieval, apparently. The locals are desperate for someone to get Plure off the planet and into Federation custody as quickly as possible. We’re the nearest Starfleet ship, so we’re elected.”

“Which will make us very unpopular when we arrive,” Marc observed. “Hence the yellow alert.”

“That’s correct,” Pressman noted. “If they get wind of our approach, the Candelarans may even try to intercept us. Not the authorities, but the citizens.”

Will felt an unfamiliar tension squeeze his gut at this discussion. He had wanted to do something—anything. He hadn’t wanted to simply cruise around space without apparent purpose—“exploring” for the sake of exploration. Now they had a purpose, a mission, and it sounded like a dangerous one. There was an element of excitement to it all, but also a nagging fear. His life had been in danger before—certainly when he’d followed Paul Rice onto Saturn’s moon, it had. But he hadn’t had a lot of time to think about it then. This time, he was in control of the ship, intentionally flying them right toward certain trouble.

He smiled, though he tried to hide it from the rest of the bridge crew. This is it,he thought. This is what I signed on for.

“Mr. Riker,” Captain Pressman said sharply. “My office. Mr. Chamish, you have the bridge.”

“Aye, sir,” Barry said.

Will gulped and followed the captain to his ready room, just off the bridge. He wondered if he’d done something wrong. He couldn’t imagine what. He’d brought the ship into orbit around Candelar IV, outside visual range from the surface, as instructed. They had made good time and arrived without incident.

When he entered the ready room, Captain Pressman was already sitting down behind a large desk. The door shut as soon as he walked through. This was the first time Will had seen inside it. The walls were a warm beige, set off by a cool blue carpet. Over the captain’s right shoulder was a large window, through which Will could see Candelar IV’s ocher sphere. Directly behind him was a shelf on which stood a small bronze sculpture that Will recognized as a Frederic Remington bronze, an old-fashioned Earth cowboy trying to hang on to a horse that reared up to avoid the strike of a rattlesnake. As if to demonstrate that he was not entirely old-fashioned, Pressman had put a model of an Ambassador-class starship on the shelf next to his Remington bronze.

“Sir?” Will asked, standing at attention.

Pressman fixed him with an unwavering gaze. “Nice flying, son,” he said. “I know it wasn’t particularly difficult, but you did what you were told to do without asking a lot of questions, and you got us here. Now we just have to get Plure off the planet and get out of here again.”

“Yes, sir,” Will said.

“At ease, Will,” Pressman said. “You prefer Will, correct? Not William? That’s what your file said.”

“That’s what I’m used to, sir,” Will answered, relaxing his stance a little.

“I make snap judgments about people, Will,” Pressman said. “Sometimes I’m told that I shouldn’t. That it’s a bad thing, a dangerous thing. Trouble is, more often than not, I’m right. My judgments are borne out in practice. So I keep doing it.”

“If it works for you, sir, I don’t see the problem.”

“There it is, Will, in a nutshell. It works for me. And I have to say, my judgment about you has been formed from precious little evidence. You’ve sat on my bridge for a few days, you’ve flown my ship, and you haven’t said much. The few times you have opened your mouth have been to ask intelligent questions or to offer opinions, most of which make sense to me. I’ve read your file, of course, and I know you had some rough times at the Academy, but I also know that you graduated near the top of your class and were quite an accomplished cadet.”

“I did my best, sir.”

“I’m sure you did. So here it is, Ensign Riker. I’m sending an away team to the planet to pick up Endyk Plure. I want you to be part of that team.”

“Me, sir?” Will asked, realizing even as the words passed his lips how stupid it sounded. The captain hadn’t been talking to anyone else.

“You, Will. I have a good feeling about you. I think you’ll prove to be a smart, capable Starfleet officer, destined for accomplishment. I don’t know what it’ll take to turn you from a raw rookie helm jockey into the kind of officer I think you can be, but my guess is that you need experience. Lots of different kinds of experience. An away mission like this one is something that doesn’t come along all that often, so I want you to be part of it. The way I see it, if you’re going to start collecting experience, there’s no time like the present, right?”

“I suppose that’s true, sir.”

“Do you see the statue behind me, Will? The cowboy?”

Will didn’t know how anyone could miss it. “Yes, sir.”

“The popular myth is that cowboys were loners. The rugged individual. Do you know what that is, Will?”

He didn’t know what the captain meant, precisely. “No, sir.”

“It’s a load of hooey,” Pressman declared. “Maybe they were, to some extent, in the sense that it was hard for a cowboy to marry and settle down, since he was out on the range for several months of the year, going off on six-month long cattle drives and the like. But the fact is, every cowboy worked as part of a team. They worked for a ranch. One cowboy can’t control a herd of cattle, or string an entire fence, or do much of anything else by himself. Cowboys were team players, and they all had to pull their weight. That’s why I keep that statue behind me—to remind everyone who stands where you are that we’re all part of a team here.”

“Makes sense, sir.”

“And the ship next to it, in case you’re wondering, is the Zhukov.First vessel I served on. Captain D’Emilio is the one who taught me the value of team play. We’re all in this together, is what he used to say. The two statues pretty much sum up my philosophy of command.”

“I see, sir.”

“Not yet, you don’t,” Pressman argued. “But you will. And you’ll start the process today, when you go down to Candelar IV. Be careful down there—when you get back, you’ll need to get us out of here fast.”

Will beamed down to the prison on Candelar IV with a trio from security: Florence Williams, Marden Zaffos, and the chief, Lt. Teilhard Aronson. Hendry Luwadis, the director of the prison, was waiting for them anxiously, and practically wept with relief when they materialized in his office.

“What took you so long?” he wanted to know.

“We came as quickly as we could,” Lt. Aronson assured him. “We were the nearest Starfleet ship, but we were still quite a distance away.”

“When we joined the Federation,” Luwadis said, “I thought we’d be better served by our membership. But this ... leaving us with this killer on our hands ...”

“Sir, we’re here to take him off your hands.” Lt. Aronson spoke with a soothing tone, but Luwadis was not easily soothed.

Glancing at the surroundings, Will began to understand his problem. This was not a highly developed world. Advanced enough to qualify for Federation membership, but probably just barely. The structure they were in, the main prison administration building, was made of stone. The office was full of uniformed, armed guards, but their weapons looked relatively primitive compared to the phaser rifle in Will’s hands. Even Luwadis’s clothing, a coppery suit a few shades darker than his skin, looked rough-hewn, as if it had been made by hand, by someone not particularly skilled or imaginative.

“You can understand how they feel,” Luwadis went on, waving a hand toward the large glass doors that led out onto a balcony. “The mob, I mean. Plure has killed more of us than anyone wants to think about. The mob wants him dead. So do I, for that matter. But we’ve agreed, by joining the Federation, to abide by Federation standards of justice. Plure should have a trial, and then he should be punished. Without that, there will be no guarantee that he is, in fact, the one responsible for all the crimes he’s been accused of. I’d rather have certainty than a quick death, even in this case.”

“You made the right decision,” Aronson said. “He’ll have a fair trial. If he’s guilty—which, on the face of it, seems pretty evident—he’ll be punished appropriately.”

“Appropriately?” Luwadis echoed. “Can he be killed seven hundred thousand times?”

“I don’t know much about his physiology, sir,” Aronson replied. “But I’d guess he can only be killed once.”

“Yes, yes, which is why you’ve got to get him out of here.”

Will noticed that Zaffos, probably made curious by Luwadis’s gesture toward the balcony, had edged closer to the doors there. Will started to move, as subtly as he could, to intercept Zaffos if he should decide to go outside. But the continued conversation between Luwadis and Aronson had distracted him, and Zaffos took two quick steps before Will could stop him.

“Wow,” he heard Zaffos say. “He’s not kidding.”

Will lunged onto the balcony. He spared only a glance toward the prison walls. Beyond them, what looked like thousands—tens of thousands, maybe—teemed, pressing up against the walls as if trying to knock them down by sheer weight of numbers. Will grabbed Zaffos’s gold-sleeved arm and tugged him toward the door. “Get back inside,” he urged. “We’re supposed to stay out of sight, remember?”

“Here, here!” Luwadis shouted from inside the office. “Don’t go out there! If they see you—”

Will and Zaffos stepped back inside and Will pushed the doors closed. But it was too late. A deafening cry rose up from the crowd on the other side of the walls. Will couldn’t make out many words, but he thought sure he heard “Starfleet” among the furious din.

“I ... I’m sorry,” Zaffos said quickly. “It’s my fault. I wanted to see.”

Luwadis scowled at him. “You wanted to see? You wanted to touch off a riot, that’s what you wanted to do!”

Will risked another glance outside. Luwadis was right. The mob’s angry cries had grown louder, and now he could see that some of them had gained the top of the wall. Prison guards were rushing to quell them, but they were vastly outnumbered and maybe even outgunned.

“Get out,” Luwadis insisted. “Get out of here, and take Plure with you, or we’re all dead!”

Four guards approached through an open doorway, surrounding a prisoner. Endyk Plure was as dangerous-looking as his reputation implied. He was a big, beefy individual, with coppery coloring similar to Luwadis’s. His muscles strained at the sleeves of the plain prison-issue tunic he wore. His face, unshaven for at least a week, was solid, jaw square, mouth cruel. His eyes were small and did not reflect much intelligence, Will thought, but maybe a vicious cunning. He stared defiantly at the Starfleet team that had come to collect him, but didn’t speak. Will knew that appearances could be deceiving, but in this case he was pretty sure that he could have picked Endyk out as a mass murderer in any lineup.

“You’re coming with us, Plure,” Aronson said. “To stand trial in a Federation court for war crimes and mass murder.”

“Sounds like fun,” Plure growled, his voice every bit as unpleasant as the rest of him. “Maybe you’ll introduce me to your family. The meals they serve here stink, and you look like some good eating.”