Текст книги "Deny Thy Father"

Автор книги: Jeff Mariotte

Соавторы: Jeff Mariotte
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And still the Tholians came. Kyle thought there might yet be a chance if they could focus the starbase’s phaser arrays on the energy generators the Tholians used to create the web, but that would have required scanning the attacking ships to find those generators, and the scanners had all been knocked out of commission by the web. As had the phaser arrays, for that matter.

Even as he ticked through the possibilities in his head, Kyle realized that there was almost no one left alive to carry out any strategy he might create. Then the command center was rocked by a singularly powerful blast and Kyle’s feet went out from under him. His head smashed against an ops console and then against something else—bulkhead or floor or ceiling, he had no idea. He saw a brilliant flash of light, then he saw nothing for an indeterminable period of time.

When he woke up, he tasted blood. He pushed himself to a sitting position and blinked his eyes open, spat blood onto the floor, fighting off a wave of nausea. Command was full of smoke; his lungs burned with it.

But at least he could sit up. Everyone else was dead.

On a flickering viewscreen he could see a Tholian ship, its red lights completely washing the starbase, so near that a tiny portion of the ship blocked the entire screen. He tried to ignore the frightening image as he stumbled from one corpse to the next, checking for pulses, listening for any faint breath. It was no good, though. Kyle’s heart was the only one that still pounded: so loud he thought the Tholians would hear it from their ships. And he was in bad shape, himself—his left arm and shoulder had been crushed, his scalp lacerated. Burns covered much of his body, and he felt unbelievably thirsty. Something had torn open his right leg almost to the bone.

Giving up on the command center, he left it, limping into the hallways to see if there was anyone alive elsewhere on the ship. He had barely taken a dozen steps when he heard what was unmistakably a human voice. But it was raised in an inhuman scream. Kyle stumbled toward it, drawing a phaser pistol he’d strapped on at the first sign of trouble. As he rounded a corner, he saw Lieutenant Michaud on her knees, tears streaming down her face, and behind her, a Tholian pointing what looked like a crooked stick at her. But it was a crooked stick that spat death in the form of a searing red ray. While Kyle watched, helpless, Michaud’s chest exploded, blood and gore spilling onto the floor even as she fell.

Kyle trained his phaser on the Tholian and squeezed the trigger. The Tholian was large, completely enclosed in a thermal suit that would enable it to survive in what must have been, to it, wretched cold. Its helmet was a faceted, crystalline mass of planes that Kyle couldn’t even really focus on; it was like trying to pick out one plane of a diamond that was spinning in a centrifuge. But he held his phaser on it, and the creature buckled, emitting a terrible, screeching noise that Kyle thought would surely rupture his eardrums, and died. When its suit burst with an explosive boom it issued a blast of heat so powerful that Kyle could feel it, like a desert wind.

Another Tholian, alerted by the first one’s death shriek, appeared at the other end of the hall and took aim at Kyle. But Kyle fired first, and this one fell too. To ease the spatial dissonance that could be caused by living inside a doughnut, the inner hallways of the rings had been constructed as short, straight segments with definite corners. Kyle approached the next corner with caution, and peeked around it, over the corpse of the Tholian he had just shot. His phaser was held in two hands, to steady it against his own shaking. The alien’s internal heat, leaking out through the phaser hole in its suit, was already almost unbearable, and as soon as he had determined that the coast was clear, Kyle hobbled, as fast as his broken body would carry him, to the next corner.

And that was when he knew he was doomed. A pack of them loomed at the far end, all bizarre-looking and carrying those sinister sticks. Kyle stayed close to his corner and fired into the pack. He knew he hit several, but the red beams started shredding the wall that was his only protection, and after a moment he turned and ran. He couldn’t get near the last corner he had passed—the Tholian was already so hot that the polymer bulkheads were melting around it. Instead, he slipped through a door that led to the central core, the “finger” of the space station.

He tried to run, but he was weakening. Behind him, he heard the Tholians following. He kept listening for voices: human voices, friendly ones, anything but the strident screeching of the Tholians, but he heard none. Instead of running, he took refuge in a Jefferies tube, descending several levels and then tucking himself away, phaser at the ready, and waiting.

It seemed to take hours. He could hear the Tholians moving through the core, blasting through walls, knocking down doors, tearing open the tubes. Every now and then he thought he heard a non-Tholian voice, but each time he did it was screaming in agony, until he no longer wanted to hear them. He began to hope that everyone was already dead so their suffering would end. He began to wonder if he should finish himself, as well: if a phaser blast to the head would be less painful than sitting and waiting and finally succumbing to one of those sticks.

But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was Kyle Riker, a survivor from way back, from a long line of survivors. His great-great-grandfather, the stories went, had led the residents of a small Wyoming town safely through the grim days of World War III, fighting off the marauding bands of refugees that had combed the nation’s wild places in those days, as well as the radiation poisoning that had killed millions. The town had lost two residents, both to exposure during a particularly long, cold winter, but otherwise they had all made it through the worst days. Eventually, of course, Jamie Riker had died of old age, and many of those under his protection had gone as well, of natural causes, mostly. But the legend lived on—a Riker had persevered and kept his town alive when the rest of the world was going mad. Kyle already had failed to live up to that example, though—if the starbase was his town, he had utterly missed the mark.

Even so, he was unable to just give up. It wasn’t in his nature.

And finally, they found him again. They breached the tube twenty meters from him, and he started firing as soon as the first Tholian showed his ugly crystalline face mask. At the same time, he tried to stand, to run again, but his injured muscles had frozen up, locked him in place. Stuck where he was, in a half-crouch, he tried to raise his phaser again, but it was so heavy, so heavy. ...

Just as the red beam from a Tholian stick weapon struck him, he stumbled and fell flat, the beam slicing across his back as he landed facedown on the surface of the Jefferies tube.

Chapter 14

Kyle lost consciousness again, so he didn’t see precisely when or why the Tholians left. Maybe they thought they’d killed him. Maybe the Berlinhad come too near and it was time for them to retreat. At any rate, they’d sent their message, loud and clear. Don’t get too close to us,they had said. From now on, Starfleet would pay attention.

Kyle had remained comatose through the whole journey on the Berlin.He hadn’t come around until he’d been transferred to an infirmary in San Francisco, where his care had been taken over by Dr. Katherine Pulaski. She credited his own will to live for his incredible survival, in the face of enough wounds to kill several times over. He had always credited her medical skills. Yes, he had wanted to live, but until she came along he didn’t have the tools to fight for life. She taught him those, and more—she gave him another reason to live, one he hadn’t had since Annie had died eighteen years before.

Kate Pulaski had brought a unique combination of medical and psychological insights to his case, leavened with good humor and a powerful dose of humiliation. “You can do better than that!” he remembered her barking one day during physical therapy, when he’d wanted to give up after a dozen achingly slow laps around his room.

“I can’t take another step,” he had protested meekly.

“My niece can walk faster than that, and she’s not even a year old yet,” Kate countered tartly. “And she does it without complaining, which is something you might think about.”

Kyle remembered smiling at her, although that meant lifting his head, which was also painful. “You’re the devil,” he had insisted. “And ...” he searched his mind for an adequate insult, but couldn’t come up with anything he hadn’t already used during that session. “And you’re named after a fire-fighting tool.”

“It’s named after me,” she shot back. “Well, an ancestor, on my father’s side. He’s been dead for hundreds of years and I’m sure he can walk faster than you, too. Now get at least another lap done before you break down and cry like a baby.”

He had complained, but he had done the lap. And the next one, and the one after that. Kate had a way to keep spurring him on to new achievements, and the persistence to not let him quit until he really couldn’t go on. She had brought him back from the edge of the grave, there was no doubt of that.

Now, thinking about Kate, about Simon and Commander Bisbee and Lieutenant Michaud and Li Tang and the rest of the brave souls who had died on Starbase 311, Kyle felt his eyes threaten to fill with unexpected tears. He blinked them back, glad there was no one here to see this. It was undignified, a man crying for the dead and the lost, all these years later. An observer might see him and assume he was crying because of his memories of himself, wounded and broken, so weak that his doctor, whom he came to love, had to help him take baby steps, had to support his weight and guide him to a window so that he could see that he really had come home. Or that observer might think he was crying for that doctor, whose love he won and as quickly threw away. Their love had flamed hot for a year, a little more, but then, once he had the strength to function without her, he had somehow come to believe that she was holding him back. He wanted a career again, he wanted to matter to Starfleet, he wanted to apply the hard lessons he had learned on Starbase 311 to his craft. Being with Katherine Pulaski could only get in the way of that, tie him down, and so he had driven her away.

He dabbed at his eyes, smiling wryly at his own foolishness, and picked up the padd again. Something he had seen, scouring the records before he had distracted himself with his own memories ...

He found it. Most of the logs of Starbase 311 had been destroyed in the Tholian attack, but portions had survived, and there was one he had never paid attention to before. A shuttle hangar log showed that in the moments before the red alert, someone had tried to launch one of the shuttles. A mechanical failure had kept it grounded, and then once the attack came, all docking bays and hangars were closed to prevent enemy incursion. There was no record as to who had tried to flee the station moments before the Tholians came, or why. But it was curious, just the same. Did someone know the attack was imminent? Who might have known that, and who would have had good reason to run?

When an idea occurred to Kyle, he tried cross-referencing with the bits of remaining logs he could access. He had also downloaded the inspection reports of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers team that went to the ruins of 311 and decommissioned her, and he checked and cross-checked those as well.

What he discovered surprised him. Heidl, Roone, and Bistwinela had not been near their lab when the attack came. Heidl’s body had been found near the shuttle hangar, Roone and Bistwinela outside the transporter room. More strangely still, when the S.C.E. team had made it into what was left of their lab, it had been dismantled. The Tholians had damaged it, as they had the rest of the station, but none of the apparatus or data that had presumably been in there before the attack was there after. The data, in fact, was never found.

Kyle felt a chill run up the back of his neck. Those three hadbeen up to something, he thought. Something bad—something dangerous. Had they conspired with the Tholians, or was the timing of the attack coincidental? They were all dead; at this point, he would never know. But it caused him to wonder how much else he didn’t know about Starbase 311, and the rest of the Federation as well.

He set the padd aside and stared toward a rusty patch on the wall opposite his bunk, eyes unseeing. No matter what he learned, or figured out, now, it would be a while before he could investigate further or bring it to anyone’s attention.

A long while indeed.

He had just fallen asleep—sleep being one of the few ways of passing the time available to him on the Morning Star,in addition to talking now and then with John Abbott, exercising in his room, and his twice-daily runs up and down the long halls, with some ladder climbing thrown in for good measure—when he heard his voice being called. He hadn’t even realized that his quarters had a comm system, although it only made sense.

“Mr. Barrow,”he heard again. The creaking voice could only belong to a Kreel’n.

“Yes, what is it?” Kyle answered, assuming that whoever it was could hear him.

“This is Captain S’K’lee,”the captain’s voice said. “I thought perhaps you’d like to visit the bridge?”

Kyle didn’t think twice. He could sleep anytime. Anyway, day and night meant nothing on board the ship. In his quarters he could turn the lights up or down at will, and the rest of the vessel was uniformly dark. And he didn’t know anyone except Abbott, barely could tell one Kreel’n from the next, so similar did they look to his untrained eye, so he couldn’t measure time of day by crew members’ shifts. As the weeks had passed, trying to keep track of time had seemed less and less important. He slept when he was tired, he ate when he was hungry, and the rest of the time he tried to keep occupied, mentally, physically, or both. “I would be most interested,” he replied, grateful for the diversion.

“Come up, then,”S’K’lee told him. “I will expect you shortly.”There was a barely audible click as she broke the connection. Like most of the other systems on this ship, communications seemed to be operated with fairly ancient technology. Kyle wouldn’t have been too surprised to look underneath the Morning Starand see a couple of sets of wheels there for landings.

But the door opened when he worked the complicated opening mechanism, so he stepped into the dim, utilitarian corridor and tried to remember where the bridge was. He had only a vague mental image of the ship’s layout, even after all his days on board. The ship didn’t seem to have anywhere near the clean lines of the Starfleet vessels he was used to, but instead it was bulky, almost boxy, with a massive, squared-off bow, tapering slightly toward the stern. He’d been told that she could move fast when she needed to but he had a hard time believing it.

The bridge, he knew, was in a separate dome section that jutted out from the top, not far back from the bow, breaking the line of the ship like an afterthought. Which meant that Kyle had to work his way in that direction. Assuming the artificial gravity was standard, the ladders would take him up. If, however, that assumption was wrong, he might be going in entirely the wrong direction.

But he was in luck. The ship’s gravity was indeed Earth-like, and what felt like up to him was indeed up. After several minutes of searching he found what must have been the topmost deck, and then he ran across one of the more humanoid crew members in the corridor, a female with sleek fur like a panther’s, black spots underneath. “I’m looking for the bridge,” he said. “Captain S’K’lee invited me up.”

She looked at him for a moment as if surprised he could speak at all, then tilted her head toward the ceiling and wandered away. He wasn’t sure if she was indicating that he should continue going up, or if it was some form of shrug. At any rate, he was back on his own again, and he roamed through the corridor until he heard a familiar voice behind him.

“Mr. Barrow,” John Abbott boomed jovially.

“Mr. Abbott,” Kyle said. “I’m looking for the bridge.”

“S’K’lee must be having a party,” John said. “She’s asked me up as well.”

“I’ve been curious,” Kyle said. “Have you ever seen S’K’lee pilot the ship?”

“Of course, many times,” Abbott replied.

“How does she do it?” Kyle wondered. “You know, being blind.”

“That, my friend, is something she’ll have to explain to you. It’s beyond me. Just follow me, and all will be revealed.”

He led Kyle up the corridor he’d been walking down, then fiddled with a gearlike contraption on the wall that Kyle would have had no idea how to use. With a soft hiss, a panel slid open, revealing a wide staircase—its stairs short and close together, like the ship’s ladder rungs—leading up to a large, domed space that Kyle knew must be the bridge.

“Guests on the bridge,” Abbott shouted when they were halfway up. Kyle was just able to see crew members, mostly Kreel’n of course, moving about the bridge or working at various stations. The control panels he could see looked much as they had on other starships he’d visited, if a little more primitive. The walls and ceiling of the dome were all transparent and the spacescape beyond was quite beautiful.

Captain S’K’lee spun around in her chair, which was positioned in the dead center of the round room. “Welcome,” she squeaked.

“Captain,” John said before Kyle could even open his mouth. “Mr. Barrow here doesn’t believe you can fly this bucket.”

Kyle shot the man an angry glance. “That’s not precisely the way I put it,” he explained quickly. “I just asked how you could pilot, since, as I understand it, ships’ captains voluntarily undergo surgical blinding.”

S’K’lee made her laughing noise again, long and loud. “Visiting a museum once, when I was much younger, I put on a special helmet that reputedly approximated the visual acuity of humans,” she said when she had brought her laughter under control. “I was astonished that you even think you cansee. By our standards, you’re quite blind yourself, even at your optimum.”

She could be right,he supposed. With six eyes ringing half their heads, at the very least a Kreel’n’s field of vision would be much greater. And he supposed there could be advantages to depth perception, possibly making them more adept at judging distances, and maybe better able to shift from close to distant focus.

“Even so,” he said. “At least I can look out the viewscreen and see what’s ahead of me.” John Abbott, he noted, stood by silently, occasionally nodding to himself. He’d heard all this before.

“Your way of seeing—even our way—just gets in the way when doing complicated flying,” S’K’lee said. “My ship’s instruments tell me everything I need to know. In a tricky situation, the momentary gap between perception and response could be fatal, if I relied on my vision. But when I rely on the ship’s perceptions and responses, the possibility of error is all but eliminated. Seeing would only endanger the ship and crew, making me more likely to trust my own senses instead of my instruments, if they should be at odds. Hence, the blinding procedure.”

“Still,” Kyle said. “If the ship’s crew can see, it must be a bit harrowing to them when you’re at the helm in a tight spot.”

S’K’lee fixed some of her dead black eyes on him as if she were looking at him. “They trust,” she said simply. “They trust.”

Kyle glanced about at the ship’s officers, going about their routines now. They looked capable enough, and he’d had no problems with S’K’lee’s flying when they left the space station. And certainly in his years, he’d encountered much stranger things. “Thank you,” he said. “For the explanation.”

“I’m afraid I have something else to explain to you,” S’K’lee said. Kyle was no expert, but the tone of her scratchy, squealy voice seemed to have changed a little. He couldn’t make out what this change might signify, though.

“What is it?”

“You can’t see it,” S’K’lee said with a grimace that Kyle took to be a smile, “because it’s beneath us just now. But we’ve been hailed by a Starfleet ship—the LaSalle,I believe its captain said it was.”

Kyle felt his heart slam against his ribcage like a wild beast vying for release. Suddenly dizzy, he reached for the nearest control podium and held on for support. Hoping no one had noticed, he glanced over at John Abbott, who still watched S’K’lee, apparently unconcerned.

“Hailed?” Kyle managed to croak out. “Why?”

“According to its captain, we’re harboring a fugitive,” S’K’lee said. “I, of course, told them we were doing no such thing and invited them to beam aboard and search us if they chose.”

“And their response?” John asked.

“They’ll have a security squad here in ten minutes,” S’K’lee replied. “I stalled them for a while, but I thought it best to warn you both. Just in case.”

“I’m sure it’s some kind of mistake,” John said.

“Of course,” S’K’lee agreed.

“I’ll return to my cabin, then.”

“As you wish,” S’K’lee told him. “And you, Mr. Barrow?”

“I ... uh, I’ll do the same,” Kyle said. He felt like his world was turning upside down, like the temporary sense of security he had enjoyed had been suddenly shattered. In a blurry haze, he followed John Abbott off the bridge and down a succession of ladders. Finally, John looked back at him, as if surprised to see that he was still there.

“You passed your deck a while back, Barrow,” he said abruptly. He seemed a bit winded now, though Kyle thought that might have been because he’d been hurrying down ladders barely wide enough for his bulk.

“Oh,” Kyle said dumbly. “I ... I guess I lost count.”

“Got you a bit nervous?” John asked with a grin.

“Well, you know. The idea that there might be a fugitive on the ship, it’s a little frightening.”

John touched his chin and nodded. “It certainly is,” he said.

“I guess I should go back up then. To my own cabin,” Kyle said.

“I suppose. When this is all over, we’ll have a drink and laugh about it.”

“It’s a deal,” Kyle agreed. He climbed back up to his own deck and found his own cramped quarters. But should I bother going in?he wondered, half-panicked. Should I run? To where? Surely they’ve already scanned the ship, they know there are only two human passengers aboard. If I ran, all I could do would be to get myself lost, but I couldn’t hide from them for long.

He sat down on the edge of his bed, breathing deeply and trying to calm his fears. The captain hadn’t specified that the fugitive was human, had she? Starfleet might have any number of reasons for seeking out anyone on board such a big vessel. And at least he hadn’t begun having Tholian flashbacks again, he realized with some satisfaction. There was that much to be grateful for.

But he couldn’t shake the certainty that they had come for him. He was still sitting there, trying not to think about what the Starfleet Security team might have in store for him, when there was a knock at the door to his room. “Come in,” he said, and the door hissed open.

Two uniformed security officers, one an average-sized human female and the other a yellow-skinned being so tall he had to stoop his shoulders to avoid hitting his massive, shaggy head against the passageway’s ceiling, peered at him through the open door but didn’t enter. “Mr. Barrow?” the human woman asked.

“That’s right,” Kyle said.

“Mind if we ask you a few questions?”

“That depends,” he answered, plastering a quick grin on his face to defuse the defensiveness of his response. “What about?”

“Did you know the man who called himself John Abbott?”

Kyle picked up on the past tense reference right away. “What do you mean, ‘did’ I? Of course I know him.”

“How well?”

“Has something happened to him?” Kyle demanded.

The shaggy yellow creature spoke for the first time, his voice deep and rumbling with menace. “Please just answer our questions, Mr. Barrow. It’ll be easier on everyone.”

The woman flicked her eyes toward her partner, and Kyle got the impression that their working styles were not always in smooth confluence. “I’m afraid that Mr. Abbott took his own life,” she explained, sounding sympathetic. “When he heard we had come for him.”

“Took his own life? Why?” Kyle asked, already forgetting the tall one’s warning.

The woman blew out a sigh. “How well did you know him?” she asked again.

“Just casually,” Kyle replied. “We were the only humans on the ship. We had a few drinks together, had a chat from time to time. I didn’t know him before we met during the trip, and wouldn’t consider him a friend. But I’m sorry to hear that he’s dead. Was he in some kind of trouble?”

“You could say that,” the tall yellow officer said. “Abbott was a killer. In his cargo, we’ve found parts belonging to at least a dozen different bodies. But the captain of this ship says that a couple of her crew members have gone missing in recent weeks, and now she’s worried that he might have been continuing his spree on board.”

“You don’t mind if we have a look around in here?” the woman asked. Her tricorder had already appeared in her hand.

Kyle stepped away from the door to let them in. The yellow alien had to bend over uncomfortably far to fit beneath the low jamb, ducking like a palm tree in a hurricane, or a snow-laden fir. “Not at all,” he said, his mind racing to determine if there were anything in the room that might point to his real identity. As long as they didn’t try to access his padd, he thought he’d be okay.

Both officers ran their tricorders across the room—scanning for body parts, Kyle guessed, though he couldn’t be sure if any of their outlandish story had even been true. When they were finished they locked eyes and shared a shrug.

“You’re not making this up?” Kyle asked. “About Abbott and the bodies?”

“It’s not our job to tell spooky stories,” the yellow one said. “Abbott wouldn’t have told you any, would he? Maybe let on where he stashed his newest victims?”

Kyle shook his head grimly. “This is the first I’ve heard of anything like that,” he said. “He seemed like a nice enough fellow to me.”

“That’s what they always say about the worst ones,” the woman told her companion. “Thanks for your cooperation, Mr. Barrow. Sorry to disturb you. Enjoy the rest of your trip.”

They both stepped from the room, the tall one scrunching himself down again to get out, and the door closed behind them. In the wake of their visit, Kyle found himself at once astonished and terrified. He had known that Abbott was a phony name, of course, but had thought maybe the man was a smuggler or something. Certainly nothing as sinister as a killer.

As he sat back down on the bed, he realized that the other thing Abbott had been was the only other human being he had spoken with on the Morning Star.Now there was no one on the ship but the crew, mostly Kreel’n, who had shown no indication of wanting to interact with him at all.

You wanted to be left alone,he told himself. Congratulations. It doesn’t get much more alone than this.

Where is he?

He’s everywhere. He’s nowhere.

What does that mean?

No one has seen him. There have been no records of his showing up anyplace—he hasn’t been home, he hasn’t been to his office, he hasn’t been near Headquarters. But his padd’s GPS shows that he’s everyplace from Venus to Taipei to Taurus II. Every reading comes from someplace different. It’s as if he’s completely vanished.

That’s impossible!

Exactly my point. We’ve lost him, or he’s lost himself. Either way...

But... but I want him! I want to see him squirm, see him suffer. I want him crushed! There’s a high price that needs to be paid, and Kyle Riker is the one to pay it!

I’m not resting... I won’t rest, until he’s found. And punished.

Yes, punished...

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