Will knew that Paul didn’t mean it. Despite appearances, they were still good friends. Paul was just trying to wheedle him, to push him into playing along with his stunt. The problem was, even though Will knew that, it was working anyway. And when some of the other cadets started piling onto Paul’s side, he knew it was hopeless.
“Yeah, Riker,” Donaldson jeered. “What are you afraid of?”
“Okay, okay,” Will relented. “If it means that much to you, I’ll do it.”
This drew a round of approval from the gathered cadets, and Will felt his stomach sink even as he agreed to it. What Paul wanted was a race, one against one—mano a mano, as he put it. But they had completed their flights for the day, and they didn’t have personal ships to race in. Which meant they would have to—Paul had used the term “borrow”—two shuttles from the Academy Flight Range orbiting Saturn. There would be some security, of course, but that was mostly geared toward keeping outsiders from coming in, not wayward cadets from leaving. Liberating the two shuttles could be done. Flying them would raise an alarm, though, and returning unnoticed would be impossible.
The trip would be relatively short, just around Phoebe, one of Saturn’s many moons, and back. Once Will had agreed to it they had suited up, made sure the two Type-6 shuttles were prepped, and with some other cadets distracting the shuttlebay crew, they’d made their getaway. Will recognized the stupidity of his action—he had come here instead of letting Trinidad take his place because he didn’t want to break a comparatively minor rule, and now here he was smashing a huge one. But he’d still thought they would be able to get away with it, and if they flew well, they might even get away with just a minor talking to instead of a real punishment.
But that had been before things started to go wrong. Now he knew that he’d be lucky to avoid expulsion. If he even lived long enough to be expelled.
Will had been first out of the bay, but not by much. He thought he was coaxing every available ounce of speed from the shuttle, but somehow Paul found more and pulled ahead. Will had stayed close behind, though, as they neared Phoebe. Circling the moon and whipping back would require the most careful flying—she was large enough to have a faint gravitational pull, and the trick was to get in close enough to make a narrow turn without getting so close it bogged you down. Paul was, Will thought, going in closer than was necessary or wise. He’d been tempted to follow suit, but then had noticed his instrument panels reacting violently and had pulled back.
This is trouble, Will thought. Unless he misread his instruments, Paul was caught in an ion storm near the moon’s surface. That was when Will decided that he was not, in fact, having any fun at all. He tapped his combadge. “Paul! Are you all right?”
What he heard back was static, and then Paul’s voice, fragmented and breaking up. “... trouble ... storm is making ... can’t pull ...”
Paul’s ship disappeared from his viewscreen then, though he could still follow its progress on his instrument panel. It seemed to be diving toward Phoebe’s surface. “Paul, get out of there!”
He heard only static in reply.
“Emergency, Starfleet Academy Flight Range,” Will called out, “this is shuttle—hell, I don’t know what shuttle I have. Do you read me?”
“We have you,” a voice answered. “Where’s the other one?”
“You need to make an emergency transport,” Will insisted. “He’s going down on Phoebe.”
“We can’t even see him, Cadet,” the voice reported. “We can’t get a lock. There seems to be some interference.”
“It’s an ion storm,” Will told the voice. “That’s why he’s lost control of his shuttle.”
“He lost control because he tried to fly a shuttle that was in for repairs into an ion storm,” the voice said. “We’ll send an emergency evac team out after him, but we can’t transport him off there with the storm going on.”
Damn it! Will thought. He’d known better than to let Paul egg him into this stupid game, and now it had all gone sour, as he’d somehow known it would. He made a quick decision and hoped it was the right one. “He’ll never live long enough on the surface for your team to get there,” Will said. “I’m going in to pick him up.”
“Negative, Cadet,” the voice instructed. “Don’t try that. Just wait for us.”
“Riker out,” Will said, and broke off communication. “Computer,” he said out loud, as much for his own benefit as for the computer’s, “we’re going in.”
“Inadvisable,” the computer argued. “Atmospheric conditions are too severe.”
“Nevertheless,” Will explained. “We’re doing it. Shields at full power.”
The computer is obviously smarter than I am, Will thought. It knew this was a fool’s errand. But it complied with his commands, and he started the pitched descent toward Phoebe’s icy surface. As the shuttle entered the ion storm, Will felt it buffeted about in spite of the presence of the shields, and he knew that without the shields he’d be a dead man for sure. Of course, it’s early yet, he thought.
But something happened as he piloted the small craft down, through the battering of the storm and the entry into Phoebe’s thin atmosphere. Where flying had been mechanical for Will, something at which he was skilled but which he had to think through, now, suddenly, he was doing it all almost unconsciously. His hands made the right moves across the control pad, manipulating the pitch and yaw of the ship as it dropped closer and closer to the surface, controlling the direction and speed, following the locator beacon that Paul had, at least, managed to deploy. He did it all smoothly and without hesitation, as if he’d been flying all his life, and even when he realized what he was doing he was able to keep doing it. Concern for Paul had taken the self-consciousness out of piloting the ship and the abilities that had become ingrained through hours and hours of practice and training had taken over.
Phoebe grew enormous in the viewscreen, its surface rugged and terrifying. Vast chasms of ice whipped past beneath him, and tall jagged cliffs. If he had to land on this moon, he realized, they’d both be waiting for the emergency team from the flight base, and the chances were that neither of them would survive. He would try to avoid landing, even though that left only one option, and it wasn’t much better. But as he neared the locator beacon he prepared himself to take it.
He tapped his combadge again. “Paul, can you hear me?”
There was no response. Maybe this was all moot, he knew. Still, he had to take the chance. “Paul, do you read me?” No answer.
That didn’t matter. He was closing fast and his best shot, maybe his only shot, was coming up. Leaving the ship’s control on autopilot for the moment, he turned to the transporter controls. Scanning for Paul, he was almost surprised when the transporter got a lock almost immediately. He was very near, then—otherwise the ion storm would have interfered. But he couldn’t transport Paul on board with the shields up, and lowering them during an ion storm, this close to the moon’s surface, was virtually suicidal.
It was also the only thing he could do. With Paul’s coordinates locked, he braced himself as best he could. “Shields down,” he said, following it with “Energize.”
As soon as the shields went down the shuttle was pounded by the storm, driving it into a downward spiral. Will fought for control, but the moon’s harsh surface spun sickeningly toward him. “Shields up,” he muttered, struggling to find voice with the g-force pulling at him. The deflector shields returned to full power, or as much as they had left to give after being bombarded by the storm, offering Will a modicum more control of the shuttle. But he was still dropping fast, spinning like a top.
So instead of trying to fight the spin, he decided to go with it. He turned into the spin, and pointed the nose down instead of attempting to pull up. For a moment, the surface was right there in front of him and he was certain he’d miscalculated. But in the next moment his maneuver paid off—he had turned completely away from the surface and was skimming above it upside down. His stomach lurc
hed but he knew that he would live for at least a few more seconds. Now he pointed his nose down farther, except down was up. Once he was a safe distance off the surface he righted the shuttle. Getting out of Phoebe’s atmosphere and away from the storm was a relatively simple matter now. He blew out a sigh of relief, and then remembered why he had gone down there in the first place.
“That’s some nice flying,” Paul Rice said from behind him.
“Paul!”
“Now I suppose you’re going to expect me to slavishly devote my life to you or some such nonsense,” Paul said. He sat down in the chair next to Will’s, hardly looking the worse for his experience. “Well, you can forget about that.”
“I could beam you back down there,” Will warned with a smile.
“And miss your own medal ceremony?” Paul asked. “I can’t see it. Not you, Riker. Or should I say, golden boy?”
“Golden boy?” Will repeated. “We’ll both be lucky if we’re not expelled.”
“If I had died, you’d be expelled,” Paul ventured. “Since I didn’t, we’ll probably get by with a reprimand.”
“A reprimand? You broke their ship!”
“Wasn’t much of a ship,” Paul countered. “I think it was broken to begin with.”
“Well, yeah,” Will admitted. “It was. Good choice, Rice.”
“I was still winning, wasn’t I?” Paul asked. “Bum ship or no.”
“That’s true, you were ahead,” Will said. “I was going to pass you on the home stretch, though.”
Both cadets laughed then, and kept laughing most of the way back to the Flight Training Base.
* * *
“It was amazing, Will,” Felicia said when she saw him. She’d greeted him with a hug and a big kiss, which Will found pretty amazing in itself. “Ambassador Spock was brilliant, of course. And so nice!”
“You got to meet him?” Will asked her, full of envy. They were in her room, and she was beaming as if she had just now finished shaking the ambassador’s hand.
“Yes, at a reception afterward. He was warm and friendly and even a little bit funny.”
“Funny?” Will echoed. “We are talking about Spock the Vulcan, right? Not some other Spock?”
“Well, you know, not the kind of funny that you see in Estresor Fil’s cartoons, but wry.”
“I guess I can see wry,” Will said. “I’m glad you had such a good time.”
She hugged him again, and then sat him down on her bed, with one hand clutching his arm and the other resting across his thigh. “I did, Will, I really did. I just kept wishing you were there. You’ve got to watch the speech, though, even if you don’t get to meet him yourself.”
“Well, maybe one of these days,” Will said. “Assuming I don’t get kicked out of the Academy.”
Felicia’s beautiful lips made an O shape. “Kicked out? What do you mean?”
“I’m surprised you haven’t heard,” he said. “Bad news usually travels fast around here.”
“I haven’t heard anything, Will. What’s going on?”
He told her about the unauthorized race, the theft of the shuttles, and Paul’s misadventure on Phoebe. He didn’t leave out any details, and when he was finished she had a look of total shock on her face.
“Will, you stupid dumb idiot! I am so glad you’re okay. But how lame can you possibly be?”
“How many degrees of lameness are there?” he replied. “Because I guess I’m pretty far down the list.”
“And you don’t know yet what your punishment is going to be?”
“I’m supposed to report to the superintendent in ...” he looked at his chron. “Twenty-two minutes. With Paul. I guess we’ll both find out then.”
“Can I go with you?” she asked, stroking his arm solicitously.
“Better not,” he suggested. “Guilt by association, you know. Save your own career.”
“I’ll wait outside,” she said. “But I want to know what happens as soon as you get out.”
“Deal,” Will agreed. “If I get thrown out you can make me dinner to console me. If I don’t, you can make me dinner to celebrate.”
“There are ... various ways we could celebrate,” she said with a sidelong glance.
“If you’re suggesting what I hope you are,” Will said, “I don’t want to think about it until after I’m out of Superintendent Vyrek’s office. I swear that Vulcan can read minds. Even without a mind-meld.”
“Then I’m not going to tell you what I’m suggesting,” Felicia declared. “Until after.”
Twenty-seven minutes later, Will and Paul were standing at attention in the superintendent’s office as she paced in a circle around them, hands clasped behind her back. Captain Pendel, their flight instructor, and Admiral Paris were also in the room, but both men stood back and let the superintendent have the floor. “You are lucky that I am a Vulcan, gentlemen, and not a human. Because a human, at a time like this, would have a very difficult time controlling her anger. You are both, for the most part, excellent cadets, with admirable records. But you are both headstrong, impulsive, and apparently lacking in any kind of what you call common sense and what I call reason. You stole—stole—vehicles from the Academy’s Flight Training Base. One of those vehicles was in for repairs, but you somehow were not even aware of it. You, Mr. Rice, managed to crash that vehicle into one of Saturn’s moons without killing yourself. You, Mr. Riker, disobeyed a direct order and flew into an ion storm in order to rescue the foolhardy Mr. Rice. The fact that you are both standing here is an affront to the laws of probability, not to mention the regulations of Starfleet. Does that about sum it up?”
“It seems to, sir,” Will said, suitably chastened by her monologue.
“Yes, sir,” Paul agreed.
“You are both in your last year,” Superintendent Vyrek continued. “I should put you back a year. But Starfleet can use your skills sooner rather than later. And I would have to put up with you both for another year, and that aggravation, I assure you, is more than I can bear. Therefore, I will not punish myself and my instructors in such a fashion. Instead, I will put a strongly worded reprimand in each of your permanent files. And I will advise you not to be brought back to this office again, for any reason, during your final months at this Academy. If you are, I will not even take the time to talk to you, but will summarily expel you. Am I understood?”
“Loud and clear, sir,” Paul said.
“Mr. Riker?”
“Yes, sir,” Will answered. “Understood, sir.”
“The fish incident was bad,” Superintendent Vyrek said. “This is far, far worse. Do not let it happen again.”
“Yes, sir,” both cadets replied in unison.
“I have nothing more I care to say to either of you,” the superintendent said dismissively. “But I believe Admiral Paris does.”
Owen Paris stepped to the center of the room and stood in front of the cadets, looking them up and down as if on an inspection tour. “Gentlemen,” he said. “That was quite a stunt you pulled. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
“We are, sir,” Paul said.
“As Admiral Vyrek says, you are lucky you’re not both dead. You do realize that, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Will replied. “We do.”
“You went down on one of Saturn’s frozen moons, Rice. And you went after him, Riker, even though it meant flying with no shields in an ion storm, less than a kilometer from the surface.”
“That seems to be an accurate description, sir,” Will said.
“Stupid. Incredibly stupid.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I docked both your grades the last time we were here together, didn’t I? After what Admiral Vyrek so astutely refers to as ‘the fish incident’?”
“Yes, sir, you did,” Paul said. “And my squadron had to repeat the class.”
“The second time you took it, your grade improved, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, it just improved again. Bot
h of you. Out of a possible one hundred points in my class, you both score one-fifty.”
“I’m sorry, sir?” Will said, not quite understanding.
“You were stupid, both of you,” Admiral Paris explained. “By all rights your frozen corpses should be up on Phoebe. But you survived. I teach a survival class. I haven’t had any students show me what you two have, ever.”
“Yes, sir,” Paul said. Will was still at attention, eyes front, but he could hear Paul’s smile in his voice.
“But, sir—” he began.
“Just say ‘yes, sir,’ ” Paul instructed him.
“Yes, sir,” Will repeated, catching on. “And thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me,” Admiral Paris said. “Just stay out of trouble. A few more months, okay? I think even you two can do that.”
“Yes, sir,” both cadets responded.
“You are dismissed,” Superintendent Vyrek said from her desk. Her voice was weary. Will suspected he’d be weary too if he had to deal with cadets like himself all the time.
Outside, Felicia waited for him. She ran to him when he exited the building, arms wide, and he caught her in his own and scooped her up. “A reprimand in my file,” he said. “And Paris raised my survival grade.”
“So it’s celebrating and not consoling?”
“That’s right,” he affirmed.
“Oh, goody,” Felicia said. She nuzzled against Will’s neck and nipped the flesh there with her teeth. “Then I can tell you what I was suggesting earlier.”
“I’m not sure we need to really talk about it,” Will said, his lips urgently seeking hers. “In fact,” he mumbled against her mouth, “talking may even be counterproductive.”
Felicia broke away from him and started to run. “Oh, we can talk,” she shouted back over her shoulder. “Until we get back to my room. After that, I think we’ll be much too busy.”
And she was right.
Chapter 26
The last couple of months, Will had learned, were definitely the hardest. He had heard about schools where students could basically skate through their last year, but Starfleet Academy was not one of those. Here, course work got progressively more difficult from the beginning to the end. When he was finished at the Academy, a cadet needed to be able to step from the campus onto a starship or starbase, where the lives of others might depend on his knowledge, experience, and reactions. There could be no slacking off.
STAR TREK: The Lost Era - 2355-2357 - Deny Thy Father Page 24
