“But ... that’s crazy,” Ben said. “Starfleet doesn’t just make people disappear. There are rules, procedures. Due process.”
“Normally, I’d agree with you,” Kyle told him. “This isn’t normal, though. There’s something going on, something that isn’t right. I don’t know what it is or who’s behind it. But whoever it is wants my head.”
He watched Ben carefully as the younger man processed this data. Out in the hall, they could still faintly hear the security officers arguing with Dr. Trbovich.
“Ben, you don’t know me that well, but I hope you know I’m an honest man,” Kyle pleaded. “I just want to stay free of all this until I can figure out what’s going on. Even if they don’t kill me, if they lock me up I won’t have a chance to defend my name. But since there have been two attempts on my life in the past two nights, both seemingly with Starfleet participation, I think killing me is the likeliest outcome.”
Ben glanced at the door. The voices had faded away down the corridor. He looked back at Kyle and nodded his head. “You’re right, Mr. Riker. I don’t know you that well. But Curzon has spoken highly of you, and I’ve learned to trust the old man. So I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here.”
Kyle let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He’d only met the Trill ambassador a few times, and was now very grateful that he had left a good impression on him.
“It sounds like you’re being railroaded,” Ben continued, “and I can’t go along with that. I’ll do what I can to get you out of here, and then you’re on your own. Fair?”
“More than I could ask for, Ben. I won’t forget it.”
“I have temporary quarters nearby,” Ben said. “I’ll grab you a uniform from there. Then together we can walk out, and maybe you won’t be spotted. Just wait in here till I get back—no one’s going to disturb a sleeping mother and baby.”
“I’ll be here.”
Ben turned and went out the door, leaving Kyle alone with Jennifer and young Jake Sisko. He turned down the light, so that anyone who peeked in would have a harder time seeing the unexpected visitor inside. As he waited, he watched Jennifer Sisko sleep, her arms gently cradling her son, even in sleep her maternal instinct to cherish and protect kicking in.
He had felt like that, in the days after Will had been born. The delivery had been hard on Annie, Kyle’s wife, and for the first several days after the boy’s birth Kyle had needed to take care of both of them. He had risen to the task, though, tending to everyone’s needs, throwing himself into the job wholeheartedly. Even after Annie was feeling better, he stayed home with them, happy just to be in their company. Nobody got much sleep those first few weeks, but he didn’t care. Even the cries of his son had been magical to him. Kyle watched young Will carefully, not wanting to miss a moment of his development, as the boy became able to sit up, then to crawl, and finally to take a few steps on his own. He had exulted in his son’s first words, and then his first attempts at whole sentences.
But as time wore on—especially after Annie got sick again, and Kyle’s primary focus had to be on caring for her—the luster of having a new son faded. Daily life got in the way, Kyle had decided. He still loved his son, but other parts of life kept interfering, and that pure paternal bliss was diluted somehow. He wondered, now, how that happened. How the sheer joy of looking at his son’s face changed, through familiarity, into something different, something lesser.
He wondered if it happened to all fathers, or if it was just a failing in him.
He had not reached any conclusions when Ben Sisko returned with a bundle in his hands. As soon as he was inside with the door closed, he tossed it to Kyle. “They’re still out there,” he said. “Scurrying around the corridors looking for you. The doctors aren’t helping them, but they aren’t stopping them anymore, either. I ran into one of the nurses, and told her I was bringing Jennifer some spare clothes. I think she bought it.”
Kyle looked at Ben, and then down at his own body. Ben was considerably larger than he was. Instead of taking off his own dun-colored jumpsuit, he pulled on the uniform over his clothing. “I appreciate this, Ben,” he said, tugging the oversized tunic down over his head and shoulders. “I really do.”
“I know,” Ben said confidently. “And I want you to do one thing for me in return.”
“Name it,” Kyle said.
“Let me know how this works out. When you’ve got it all settled, I mean.”
“I will,” Kyle assured him. “Hopefully it’ll be all cleared up before you’re a captain someplace.”
Ben laughed. It was a sound that, under other circumstances, Kyle thought, might be very intimidating. “I don’t know if there’s any big hurry, then,” he said, “but we’ll call it a deal.”
With Kyle fully dressed in Ben’s spare uniform, Ben opened the door and the two of them strode confidently into the hallway, as if leaving a conference room or an officer’s lounge instead of a recovery room. A nurse passed them in the hall without a second glance, even though, to Kyle, the bad fit of the uniform seemed like a beacon.
They didn’t slow when they reached the corner, but instead made a sharp right turn and kept going. When they passed another intersection, Kyle caught a glimpse of the two security officers coming toward them. He tensed, felt himself sweating beneath the extra layers of fabric. But he kept Sisko’s bulk between himself and them and continued on. The security team didn’t seem to think twice about them. But then, they knew Kyle Riker was a civilian, so two officers in uniform would not raise a flag.
One turbolift and two minutes later, and the two men were outside the building in the cool night air. A gentle breeze felt good on Kyle’s flushed face. “There you go,” Ben said. “I’d better get back to my family.”
“You do that,” Kyle agreed. “Keep them close, always.” He fingered the uniform’s collar. “I’ll, uhh ... send this back to you.”
“Take your time.”
Ben put out his hand and Kyle took it in both of his. “Thank you, Ben. You made the right call.”
“Curzon’s a pretty good judge of character, Mr. Riker,” Ben replied. “I already knew that.”
He turned on his heel and went back inside. Kyle was alone, with who knew how many enemies around him.
Very much alone, he thought.
They came for him on the air tram. This time of night, the car was empty except for him, and there were only a couple of other passengers on the transport at all. He wasn’t sure where he would go; he just wanted to put some distance between himself and Starfleet Command. He closed his eyes, willing his body to relax after the tension back at the infirmary. But after riding for about twenty minutes, he heard it—the familiar hiss of breathing apparatus that allowed them to function in an M-Class atmosphere. He snapped to attention and saw three of them boarding his car, their suits disguising superheated crystalline bodies, multicolored masks hiding their hideous faces. They pointed long, crooked sticks at him and he knew they were about to fire.
Panicked, he dove from his seat, hitting the floor and rolling beneath a seat farther down the aisle and hunched there, breathing heavily, waiting for the worst. The red rays he expected didn’t come, though. After a few moments, he dared to open his eyes. Two elderly civilians, both human, both somewhat astonished, stared at him with concern etching their features. “Are you okay, son?” one of them asked. Both of them kept their distance, Kyle noted, as if afraid to come too close.
“I don’t ... the Tholians ...” Kyle was dumfounded.
“Haven’t seen any Tholians around here,” the other one said with a chuckle. “I think we’d notice if there were any.”
“I expect so,” Kyle agreed. Humiliated, he crawled out from under the seat. Not that it would have provided him with any protection, he thought, studying it so he didn’t have to look at the people who assumed he’d gone completely insane. Not against those weapons they carried. He remembered those weapons, and the fierce damage they could do, entirely too well
.
Realizing that he was still badly dressed in Ben Sisko’s uniform, he jumped off the transport at the next station rather than let the old couple get a longer look at him. He wasn’t sure where he was, but that was for the best. They’re starting again, he knew. The flashbacks.
He needed medical attention, or psychiatric help. But they were looking for him at the infirmary. Starfleet Command wasn’t a safe place for him now. No place was safe, really—at least, no place that Starfleet controlled, or where they had operatives. As he exited the station on a stair-lift to the street, he felt a stab of fear. What might be waiting on the street? A Starfleet assassin? A force of Tholian warriors? Something else, equally deadly, that he didn’t even know to watch for?
When he reached the street, which was dark and empty, he realized he was still carrying his padd, and it suddenly occurred to him that each padd had global positioning technology built in. A user could immediately locate his own coordinates via satellite. But conversely, that meant that someone else—someone at Starfleet, for instance, with access to the satellite, could locate the user. The mouth of an alley gaped ahead, and Kyle turned down it, looked all around to be sure he wasn’t observed, and then raised his padd, intending to hurl it full force into a blank brick wall.
He stopped his arm at the peak of his motion, though, when a different idea dawned on him. Instead of throwing the thing he sat down in the alley, back against one of the high walls, and spent a few minutes reprogramming it. When he was finished, instead of accurately signaling its position, it would send signals to satellites chosen at random, in orbit all around the world. Anyone who tried to track it would find themselves hopelessly confused. Satisfied then that his padd would no longer give away his location, he tucked it into a pocket and hurried away from the alley.
As he walked quickly through the city’s nighttime streets, Kyle hoped that whoever was looking for him developed a massive migraine from trying to use his own padd against him. Once he had figured out who was after him, and why, he hoped to give them a much worse headache.
At the very least.
Chapter 5
A sharp knock at Will’s door woke him from a sound sleep. He glanced at the chron near his bed. Four-forty in the morning. Who ... ?
“Yes?” he called, hoping his animosity was clear in his voice.
“Will Riker?”
“That’s right.” He spoke these words defiantly. Anyone who would be rude enough to come around at this hour—especially today, of all days, when he was about to embark on his final project for Admiral Paris’s survival class—was going to be told off, Riker style. “Who’s there?”
“Starfleet security, cadet. Please open the door.”
“Come in,” Riker called, the vocal command unlocking the door. Two gold-shirted officers pulled down the old-fashioned handle to open the door and enter. One of them looked at Will, his hand resting on the butt of his phaser pistol, while the other glanced about the room. “Looking for something?” Will asked, sitting up on the edge of his bed.
“We’re looking for your father, Cadet. Mr. Kyle Riker. Have you seen him recently?”
Will couldn’t restrain the laugh. “That depends. What’s recent to you?” he asked. “Five years?”
The security officer looked surprised. “He’s your father. He works here at Starfleet Headquarters.”
“And your point is ... ?”
The second security officer, the one giving Will’s small quarters the once over, seemed satisfied by his search. “He’s not here.”
“I told you that,” Will said. “He’s never been here.”
“Have you heard from him? Tonight?”
Will shook his head vigorously. “You don’t seem to get the point,” he said. “We don’t talk. At all.”
“So you’d have no idea where he is right now?”
Will glanced at the chron, as if for emphasis. “Since he’s not crazy, as far as I know, I would guess he’s home in bed. Wherever that is.”
“He’s not there,” the security man said.
“Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“Do you know where he might go? Any favorite places, anyone he’d turn to in an emergency?”
These guys just don’t have a clue, Will thought. And they’re supposed to be providing security? “I have no idea,” he said. “Listen to me—Kyle Riker and I haven’t seen or spoken to each other in five years. I don’t know who his friends are, I don’t know where he spends his time. I just don’t know. The last time I saw him was in Alaska, if that helps.”
The second security officer touched the first one on the arm. “Come on, he’s got nothing.”
The first one paused, as if unwilling to admit defeat, but then he gave a little shrug and turned away. “If you hear from him, contact security immediately,” he called over his shoulder as they left the room.
Yeah, Will thought. Because that’s likely to happen.
He looked at his bunk again, and he looked at the time. Almost o-five hundred. They were to report to the Academy’s transporter room by six-thirty. Other squadrons were being transported into the city at different times during the morning. It was foolish to think he’d get back to sleep now, and even if he did he’d have to get up soon anyway. Instead of trying, he went into his bathroom for a hot shower. It might, he knew, be his last for a while.
At the appointed hour—stifling a yawn, his eyes burning from lack of sleep—Will met his squadron mates in the transporter room. Estresor Fil looked excited, for her: her eyes open wide and sparkling with some inner light, her lips parted in something that looked like a smile-in-training. Boon lounged against an operator console, apparently as barely awake as Will himself, although with Boon that was more or less his natural state. Felicia and Dennis chatted happily between themselves, in low tones.
He had thought that perhaps Admiral Paris would be here to see them off, but he wasn’t. Instead, there were only a pair of engineers and a security officer. The campus had been buzzing with word of an attack on a lone engineer in a Starfleet Command transporter room late the night before. Will had missed most of the rumors, his mind on other things, and intentionally made an effort not to listen to them because he was already overtired and knew that he needed to be able to devote all his attention to the mission at hand. But he figured it explained the extra precautions in this room, on this morning.
Felicia looked up from her hushed conversation with Dennis and noticed Will in the doorway. She smiled at him and beckoned him over. Dennis turned, too, at Felicia’s gesture, tossing Will a friendly grin of his own. “Glad you could join us, Will,” he said, sarcasm leavened by good-natured humor.
“I seem to be developing a bad habit,” Will said. “I never used to be late to everything.”
“You’re not late,” Felicia assured him. “We’re early. Just too excited about the project, I guess.”
Will bit back another yawn. He was excited too, and should have been early, but everything had taken extra effort this morning, from getting his breakfast, to dressing, to making his way here to the transporter room. He didn’t want to have to explain why, though. If the old man had gotten himself into some kind of trouble, it was no concern of Will’s. The last thing he wanted was for his squadron to think that he would be distracted by his father’s problems, whatever they may be.
“As long as I didn’t hold anything up,” he said. He recognized that much of his concern was due to his own impatience. Just this last project stood between him and summer break, which would be followed by his penultimate Academy year. Two more, and after that he could sign onto a starship and get off this planet for a while.
“Not at all,” Dennis assured him. “But now that we’re all here ...” He addressed the pair of engineers. “We’re ready, I guess. Whenever you are.”
One of the engineers, a Bolian with an unusual fringe of brown hair around the back of his blue, bifurcated head, stepped forward then and examined the cadets. “No ph
asers, no tricorders, no padds, no combadges. You aren’t hiding anything from me, are you?”
“Not at all,” Dennis assured them. Boon, Will noted, hadn’t changed his position or his slumped posture, as if the whole process was so boring he could barely stay awake.
“Then I have one thing for you.” The Bolian handed Dennis a sealed envelope.
“Paper,” Estresor Fil noted. “How ... antiquated.”
“You won’t have instruments with which to read anything else,” the engineer explained.
“We’re supposed to consider ourselves crash-landed in hostile territory,” Dennis added. “Without our technology to rely on.”
“That’s what they tell us,” the other engineer, a human female with swept-up blond hair, said. “Step onto the pads, please.”
The five cadets did as instructed. Boon was the last one in place. Will thought he seemed reluctant, maybe even resentful. Because we put Dennis in charge? he wondered. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that—it’s Boon’s last chance to lead this squadron, and I took it away from him. But it had been the squadron’s tradition to do so from time to time, so it shouldn’t have been entirely unexpected. And Boon himself had brought it up.
Will didn’t have a chance to worry about it any longer, though. As soon as Boon was in position, the engineers began their process. “Coordinates locked,” said the human, and the Bolian, nodding, touched his keypad.
“Good luck,” the Bolian said. As he did, he began to fade from view, and Will realized that the annular confinement beam was surrounding him, beginning the process of converting his molecules into energy that could be sent to a specific, predetermined point. He had aced his transporter theory class last year, and he had been transported numerous times. But that experience hadn’t quite soothed his concerns. He knew full well that the technology was safe and time-tested, but at the same time there was something just a bit wrong about it that he wasn’t able to get used to.
STAR TREK: The Lost Era - 2355-2357 - Deny Thy Father Page 5
