Текст книги "Deny Thy Father"
Автор книги: Jeff Mariotte
Соавторы: Jeff Mariotte
Жанр:
Научная фантастика
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 23 страниц)
Chapter 9
The captain’s office was dimly lit and suffused with a burning rubber smell that reminded Kyle of old skunk. He found himself wanting to hold his breath, but knew that was impractical. Anyway, he’d have to get used to the odor since he was going to be on the ship for a while. The captain was a Kreel’n, he’d been told. Without that small warning he wouldn’t have known what to expect, and having never met a Kreel’n—rumors, of course, but that was all—he was still barely prepared for the reality of it.
“Captain?” he asked hesitantly when he entered. He had been told to enter but he couldn’t see her anywhere when he went in. Unlike the neat and tidy equivalents he had seen on Starfleet vessels, this room was barely contained chaos; seemingly a storeroom for old electronic parts, a workspace, a library, and an office all in one, with no apparent division between one function and another.
“Come in, Mr. Barrow,” a voice like a rusted hinge squeaked at him. “I am here, at my desk.”
Kyle tried to follow the voice through the gloom and clutter. He had chosen the pseudonym Barrow, on a whim, because it was both an Alaskan city he had visited on a few occasions and the name of one of the most infamous fugitives in American history, Clyde Barrow, better known in association with his partner Bonnie Parker. If you’re going to be on the lam,he’d thought, you might as well make the best of it.So he had become Kyle Barrow, man of mystery.
Finally, he saw a flat surface—mostly buried under stacks of objects whose purposes he could only make the wildest guess at—and behind the stacks, a pair of black, lifeless eyes in an oddly shaped head. He stepped forward and more of the captain came into view. Her head most closely resembled, in Kyle’s experience, a pickle or a cucumber, but larger, with a greater diameter. Her skin was a dark green, and her eyes, half a dozen of them, encircled most of her head at about three-quarters of its height. Above them were nodes and ridges running lengthwise; below the eyes some perforations that might have been aural, olfactory, or some other type of organs, and below those a definite mouth, unlipped and toothless but with a tongue capable of speaking English, though with an unpleasant rasp.
“Welcome to the Morning Star,Mr. Barrow,” she said, rising from her seat and extending a hand toward Kyle. “I’m Captain S’K’lee.”
Kyle stepped forward and took the proffered hand, shaking and then releasing it. It had, as far as he could tell, ten fingers, maybe a dozen, all narrow and wormlike, with no apparent joints. Like her head, it was a dark green, or seemed to be in the dim light. Her uniform was a simple pale green tunic, belted at what must have been her waist, though there was only a third of her entire height below it. He couldn’t see her legs, or whatever was beneath the belt, and she quickly lowered herself back down behind the desk.
“Thank you for the welcome, and for the berth,” Kyle said. “I appreciate your fitting me in at short notice.”
“Better to have a passenger than not have a passenger, right?” S’K’lee asked. “Especially a paying one.”
Kyle was not used to such blatant discussion of finances, but he understood that, primitive as it was, some races still functioned on a monetary basis. He had already arranged the transfer of the agreed-upon number of credits, through an intermediary suggested by the agent back at the freight company to assure anonymity. “I trust the payment was satisfactory?” he asked.
“Yes, quite. If it hadn’t been, you would not now be aboard my ship,” she said. “You do understand that this may be quite a long trip with a number of stops?”
“I do.”
“May I ask your ultimate destination?”
“You can ask,” Kyle said. “But I can’t answer. And I wouldn’t even if I had one in mind.”
“Understood,” S’K’lee said quickly. “Then I suppose it would be pointless to ask what the purpose of your journey is, or if, by taking you, I am opening myself up to any possible legal actions?”
“You’d be correct,” Kyle told her, “in that it would be pointless to ask. Is that a problem?”
“Not at all, not at all.” S’K’lee shook her head rapidly, which had the effect of making her many black eyes seem to blur into a single oval shape. “I simply like to know where things stand.”
“Of course,” Kyle said. He had expected discretion, and was relieved to have his expectation confirmed.
“Have you seen your quarters?”
“Not yet,” Kyle replied. “But I’m sure they’ll be fine.” After the shuttle had docked at the orbital platform, Kyle had arranged for some changes of clothes and personal grooming items, then had come straight to the Morning Star.He still held in his left hand the bundle he had acquired.
“You’ll be escorted there directly,” S’K’lee assured him. “Cargo areas, engineering, environmental, and tactical operations areas are off limits to passengers. The bridge is accessible to you only by special request. Otherwise, you are free to move about the ship at will.”
“Thank you.”
“If you’d like to disembark at any stop, simply tell a member of the crew and arrangements will be made.”
“Sounds good,” Kyle said. “I look forward to the trip.”
“It won’t be comfortable, but it’ll be long,” S’K’lee told him with a grating, huffing noise that he guessed was her version of laughter. When she finished, she asked, “Is there anything else you’d like to know, about the ship? About me?”
There was, in fact, but he was hesitant to bring it up. She had already evidenced her sensitivity to his privacy; he didn’t want to disregard hers.
“There is one thing,” she said, “that most of your kind seems to want to know about Kreel’n ships’ captains. If you’re curious, feel free to ask. I assure you it isn’t a problem for me to talk about.”
“I’m sure we will,” he answered. “At a later date.”
She made a grimace that he could only assume was a smile. “Very well, very well. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Barrow. I trust you’ll have as pleasant a voyage as is possible, under the circumstances. I need to prepare myself now—I like to pilot out of the dock myself. I’ll arrange for someone to escort you to your quarters.”
“Thank you, Captain S’K’lee,” Kyle said. Behind him, the door shushed open and he knew he was dismissed. He stepped through it and there was already a crewman coming toward him. This was also a Kreel’n, a male he guessed, though he wasn’t at all sure, with a deeper chest and broader shoulders and a head that was more squash-shaped than cucumber. He saw now that the Kreel’n did indeed have very short legs for their body size—this one was as tall as he was, but its legs were no longer than his were from the knee down.
“Right this way, Mr. Barrow,” it said, sweeping its wriggling mass of fingers in the direction from which it had just waddled.
Unlike the captain—and this was what he so desperately wanted to ask her about, though he had sensed, and apparently correctly, that in spite of her invitation it was really something that ought to wait until he knew her better—this Kreel’n’s eyes had the glimmer of life and intelligence in them. The stories he had heard about Kreel’n captains, which he had been unwilling to credit until just now, seemed to be true, though he couldn’t imagine why it would be a good idea.
They were, so the rumors went, surgically blinded before assuming their commands. Six eyes, none of which worked.
Maybe there was some sense to it, but for the life of him Kyle couldn’t fathom what it was.
* * *
His cabin was as promised—not particularly comfortable, but adequate for his very basic needs. Since the Morning Starwas of Kreel’n design, it was probably handy that in spite of their physiological differences humans and Kreel’n were about the same size. The room had a bed, toilet facilities that would meet his requirements, and a replicator. At the end of the bed was a trunk in which he could store his few belongings. The trunk’s lid was flat and could, he supposed, be used as a seat as well.
As in the captain’s office, the lighting was dim when he entered, but after examining the controls for a few moments he was able to override the default setting and increase the brightness a bit. The light glowed from walls that were otherwise unadorned, instead of being concentrated in specific fixtures.
All in all, there wasn’t much to entertain him on a long trip, he figured. But he hadn’t even begun to see the rest of the ship. As much as he intended to keep to himself, in order to preserve his privacy, he guessed he’d be spending some amount of time in the public areas. Maybe they had a gym or a holodeck, or both. A library would be good as well. Kyle wanted a lot of time to think, to reflect. But he also wanted to stay sharp, in body and mind, for the conflict that was sure to come.
He stowed his small bundle and then turned to the replicator for a cup of coffee. It would not, he knew, be as good as the real thing he brewed back home. That was a pleasure he’d have to forgo for a while, in the interest of survival. When he withdrew his cup from the replicator, it was the right color, and the aroma was good. Steam wafted from the surface. He brought it to his lips and sampled it.
Replicator coffee,he thought, disappointed in spite of himself. The same the universe over.As he drank, a Klaxon blared throughout the ship, signaling its imminent departure. Kyle sat down on top of the trunk, bracing himself for any sudden jolts, especially considering the pilot’s disability. But the launch was as smooth as any he’d experienced. He sat on the trunk at the end of his new bed and sipped his coffee, realizing he hadn’t had any solid food in hours. Once they were well under way, he’d do something about that. For now, though, he was content to drink his Java knowing that his most immediate troubles were slipping farther and farther away with every passing moment.
He needed sleep as well—it had been many hours since he’d slept, with the exception of a few fitful moments on the shuttle—but his mind was racing too fast for that to be a possibility anytime soon. Everything that had happened was still too fresh. The attacks on him were predominant in his thinking, of course, but other issues, more personal still, beat a discordant counterpoint. Running into Ben Sisko and seeing Jennifer and brand-new Jake, born on Father’s Day, so soon after being reminded by Admiral Paris that his own son Will was on the Academy campus less than a kilometer away, had been surprisingly jarring. He remembered the simultaneous joy and fear at Will’s birth and Annie’s illness. He had fond memories of times with Will, watching the boy grow up from day to day, learning new skills, forming a personality all his own. The boy had always been bright and quick-witted, and there had been days when father and son had both collapsed into puddles of hysterical laughter at Will’s antics and jokes.
But there had been dark days, too, when the pressure of Kyle’s own inadequacy as a father had weighed heavily on his shoulders. Days when Will had questions Kyle could not answer, needs Kyle could not begin to meet. Sometimes he thought his son a completely alien being, unable to be understood in the least. Other times—worse times, in some cases—he thought he was raising a carbon copy of himself, having handed down to his heir his own faults and weaknesses.
You did what you could,he told himself, sipping from his steaming mug. Given who you were—who you are—you made your best possible effort.
He had told himself that many times, over the years. As always, he wondered if it was true. Wasn’t there something more he could have given of himself, some other heroic effort he could have made had he only thought of it? Was there some other expert to whom he could have turned for advice and guidance? If he had stayed, instead of leaving—running away, he now understood, as he was running again—during Will’s fifteenth year, could they have reached some new plateau of understanding and acceptance?
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 afterwe 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—”
“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 Icommitted 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.
