Deny Thy Father

by Jeff Mariotte

  “Of course he is,” Owen answered with a chuckle. “You have had a bad night, I see. Will’s at the Academy. Second year. He’s in my survival class.”

  “That’s right,” Kyle said, trying to cover. “You’re right, Owen, I’m exhausted. I’m surprised I know my own name. I’m sure Will’s much too busy to remember something like Father’s Day, anyway. Boy’s got much more important things on his mind.”

  “Well, he’s swamped with work, I can tell you that,” Owen said. “Second-year students don’t have much free time.” He released Kyle’s arm and started back up the hall, then stopped again. “You take care, Kyle. If there’s anything I can do for you, just let me know.”

  “I’ll do that, Owen. Thank you. And give my best to Thomas.”

  “I’m on my way home to spend some time with him now,” Owen replied. His son Tom was about ten years younger than Will, Kyle remembered.

  Kyle continued down the corridor then, mentally berating himself for his ignorance. You should have known Will was at the Academy, he thought. Or you should have remembered, if you did know. He thought maybe he’d heard something about it before, and just forgotten. But the last couple of years had been hard ones for him, and most everything that wasn’t immediately crucial to his survival had gone by the wayside in favor of the physical and emotional therapy he had needed to get back on track.

  Anyway, Kyle Riker had long ago fallen into the habit of compartmentalizing his life. Recovery was in one compartment, work in another. Family was in another one, by itself. And that one, he didn’t go into often.

  Not often at all.

  Chapter 2

  “You might want to do some strategizing,” Admiral Paris told the class. “No cheating, no going into the city ahead of time and planting supplies or anything. It won’t help anyway, because you won’t know what you’re looking for until tomorrow morning, when you get out there. But you can talk amongst yourselves, figure out how you’re going to approach the teamwork aspect of the project. As an away team on a starship, you would prep for a mission in that way before you left the relative safety of the ship. And, of course, you would gather as much intelligence as you could about your destination. In this case, we’re assuming that intelligence is very limited. So that’s your assignment for tonight—think strategy.”

  He turned away from the class and returned to the podium in the front of the room, his standard signal that the lecture was over for today. Will Riker quickly scanned the notes he’d typed into his padd, making sure he had caught all the major points and could understand his own shorthand. Dennis Haynes, whose room neighbored Will’s, tossed him a cheerful grin. “This sounds like fun, doesn’t it? At least, it resembles fun more than most assignments do.”

  Will was already almost to the classroom door, but he paused to let Dennis catch up. Before his friend reached him, Admiral Paris wagged a finger at him. “Mr. Riker, if you don’t mind, I’d like a word with you before you go.”

  Dennis shrugged and Will said, “I’ll see you a little later.” Felicia Mendoza, another member of their Zeta Squadron, had joined Dennis for the trek across campus, back to their quarters. Will cast a brief, longing glance at their retreating forms, then turned back to the admiral.

  “Yes, sir?”

  Admiral Paris leaned against the podium. Will hoped that didn’t mean he was making himself comfortable for a long conversation—he really wanted to get back to his room and get started on some of the homework. It seemed to get more and more difficult as the year went on. He was only in his second year at the Academy, which meant he still had a lot of struggling to look forward to. “I saw your father earlier, Will,” the admiral said. His tone was sympathetic, not accusatory, Will noted. “Have you talked to him lately?”

  “Not real recently, no sir.”

  “I get the impression that you two aren’t particularly close.”

  “Not terribly, sir.”

  “Nonetheless, today, as you might be aware, is Father’s Day. It’s a custom on this planet, a day on which people honor their fathers, without whom they wouldn’t be here. You’ve heard of it?”

  “Yes, sir.” Will shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Where’s the anvil? he wondered. This felt like one of those times, as in the old Earth cartoons his squadron member Estresor Fil watched incessantly, when an anvil was surely going to fall on his head.

  “So I thought that perhaps it would be a good idea for you to maybe go see him, give him a call. You know. Honor your father.”

  “Yes, sir,” Will said again. “I’ll try to do that, sir.”

  The expression on Admiral Paris’s face showed that he understood just how little truth there was in Will’s promise. He even started to shake his head sadly, but then caught himself and turned it into some other head motion, as if he were looking around the room to see if any of the cadets had forgotten anything.

  I guess that’s the anvil, Will thought. The old man’s disapproval. I can live with that.

  “Is there anything else, sir?” he asked.

  “That’s it, Mr. Riker. Good day.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Will turned and hurried from the room, which had become suddenly hot and oppressive.

  Will didn’t talk to Kyle Riker. He didn’t, on those rare occasions when he thought of him at all, think of him with any special fondness, and he certainly didn’t think of him as “Dad” or “Pop” or any of the other endearing nicknames people had for their fathers. Kyle Riker was a person his mom had known once, a genetic donor, a man with whom he’d shared a few pleasant moments of his childhood, and a whole lot of stiff, awkward times. When he thought about those days, he thought mostly of the long silences, or of times when Kyle Riker would stare at him, as if trying to fathom how his young brain worked. The connection between them was biological, not emotional.

  Father’s Day. Will let out a bitter laugh, then glanced about quickly to see if anyone in the spectacular garden had noticed. Coast clear, though. There were a couple of cadets coming toward him, but they were engaged in conversation, and far enough away that they probably couldn’t have heard him.

  Kyle Riker had raised Will from infancy, if “raised” was the word for it. Will tended to doubt it. “Tolerated,” maybe. Certainly, he had fed and sheltered the boy. But he was never cut out for parenthood. Having to do it by himself, after Will’s mother had died during his second year, had proven far too difficult a task for him. Finally, during Will’s fifteenth year, he had given up altogether. His work for Starfleet had been taking him away more and more anyway, and at that point he took an extended off-world posting, leaving Will behind for good.

  So Father’s Day, while it might mean something to others, was pretty much a nonoccasion to Will. There had been times when he’d even considered losing the Riker name. He’d decided against that—what else would he call himself? He’d have to make something up, and that wasn’t the kind of thing he believed himself to be good at. If raising myself taught me anything, he’d tell people, it’s pragmatism. I don’t like to waste my time with a lot of foolish nonsense.

  Ignoring the sky overhead, pink bruising into indigo, ignoring the fresh, sweet scent of dozens of trees, grasses, and flowering plants, ignoring even the gentle breeze that blew in off the bay, fluttering leaves and flags alike, Will Riker turned his focus away from all extraneous distractions and headed for home. Tomorrow was his final project in Admiral Paris’s survival class, and it would be demanding, challenging, and crucial. The whole squadron succeeded or failed together. And there were plenty of stresses in the squadron that would work against them if they weren’t careful. Paris was right; strategy would be key. Strategy and teamwork.

  When he got back to the dorm, he went to Dennis’s room. The redheaded, ruddy-faced cadet kept a worktable and chairs directly in front of his bay window, and he and Felicia Mendoza were sitting in them. On the couch sat Estresor Fil, a petite green Zimonian female, about the color of a fir tree, who barely passed the minimum
height and weight requirements for Starfleet duty. Boon, a Coridanian, the lanky, laconic son of two miners from that underpopulated world, squatted on the floor at the foot of the couch. His skin color, common among some Coridanians, always reminded Will of an old brick storefront he had seen in Valdez, during his youth, both in texture and color. McGill’s Hardware, he remembered. He’d loved the smell inside there.

  “Come on in, Will,” Dennis Haynes said. He was a gregarious fellow, every bit as sociable as Will was reserved. They seemed, at a glance, like polar opposites in almost every way, but had become fast friends in spite of that. Or because of it—Will had never been able to decide for sure.

  “Sorry if I’m late,” Will said, entering the room and helping himself to one of the chairs scooted up near the worktable. The sky had gone dark outside, and the lights of the Academy grounds and the city beyond twinkled in the distance.

  “How could you be late?” Estresor Fil asked. “There was no particular meeting time scheduled.”

  The Zimonian seemed to Will to take everything said to her with the same degree of seriousness, as if mentioning that the day was warm or a dog was cute carried the exact same weight as a warning of a poisonous insect or a Romulan with a phaser. Add to that no sense of humor at all and a tendency to lecture rather than discuss, and you had Estresor Fil, who was Will’s least favorite member of Zeta Squadron, by far. She was so formal that she insisted both her names be used at all times.

  She was also, he had to admit, brilliant.

  Most of the work a cadet did at the Academy was done solo, but for those occasions when group efforts were needed, cadets were formed into five-person squadrons, and Zeta was his. Any Starfleet assignment was likely to be a team situation, so the cadets broke into their squadrons fairly often. There were good points and bad to this arrangement, of course. The starship atmosphere was fairly authentic, because most everyone on a starship worked with others. But it also meant relying on other people. Will was none too comfortable with that—he liked to have his fate in his own hands.

  Once Will was seated, Boon looked at the group and took command, as he had a tendency to do. He was, he had told them often, grooming himself for a captaincy, and sooner would be better than later. Will thought his personal style was at odds with his ambition—he never liked to speak in public, for instance, and didn’t believe in using three words if one would do even in private. But in spite of his reticence, he was a good student and was seemingly driven by an urge that not even Will, who was plenty ambitious himself, could comprehend. “Okay, folks,” he said. “We have a challenge ahead of us tomorrow. Everybody ready?”

  “Since we really can’t prepare,” Felicia replied, her dark eyes flashing as she tossed out a smile, “we’re probably as ready as we’re going to be.”

  “There’s always preparation to be done, right?” Estresor Fil argued. “Admiral Paris told us enough to begin our planning. We know where we’ll be, and we know what our goal is. We might as well get started on whatever we can, while we have some time. Besides, he told us to, and that’s good enough for me.”

  “In the abstract,” Will pointed out. “But not with any specifics.”

  “That’s true,” Dennis added. “We know we’ll be in San Francisco. But we don’t know what part—or even if we’ll all be together.”

  “I think we have to assume that we won’t be together, at first,” Felicia said. “We’ll need to find each other. Without using combadges.”

  “Why don’t we go over what we do know?” Estresor Fil suggested. “And then we’ll have a more definitive sense of what we don’t know.”

  Will nodded. “ ‘Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.’ ”

  “Is that more of your ancient Chinese wisdom, Will?” Felicia asked. Her accent was vaguely Latin American, and Will liked the way she pronounced certain words. She was as tall as Will, half again the height of the diminutive Estresor Fil, with an athletic, sculpted body. When she spoke, it was usually with a forthrightness Will admired, and in any physical effort she was likely to excel.

  “Sun Tzu,” Will answered with a nod. He’d been reading a lot of the military strategists of Earth’s past, including Sun Tzu, Epameinondas, Carl von Clausewitz, Antoine Henri Jomini, and others.

  Boon blew out an exasperated sigh and began a speech as long as any Will had ever heard from him. “If we could stick to the matter at hand,” he said. “Estresor Fil is right, as is Sun Tzu, I suppose. We’ll have very little information until we actually start, so there’s only so much we can plan ahead. But we know these things, I think. We’re going on an urban survival test. We will be spending a week in San Francisco. We aren’t allowed to identify ourselves as cadets, we’ll be out of uniform and incognito. We can’t break any laws. We’ll be following clues which will lead us to other clues, in a sort of scavenger hunt, to demonstrate our ability to infiltrate, for example, an enemy alien city.”

  “Should be a piece of cake,” Dennis said.

  “But that’s where what we don’t know comes in,” Will countered. “We don’t know if we’ll be transported into the city together, or separately, so we might need to track each other down. We don’t know precisely what sorts of clues we’ll be looking for, or how we’ll know the first one when we see it. We don’t know if there will be other obstacles planted in our path, although knowing Admiral Paris, I think we should count on it. We don’t even know exactly how the project ends—if we solve all the clues and find whatever it is we’re supposed to find, do we come in early? Or do we still wait out the week?”

  “At least we can’t do worse than Captain Kirk,” Dennis said with a laugh. “ ‘Do you still use money?’ ” Some seventy years back, the legendary Kirk and his bridge crew, which included Ambassador Spock, had traveled back in time to the late twentieth century and had to survive in a San Francisco three hundred years removed from their own experiences. That very mission was the inspiration for this particular Academy exercise.

  “They survived, didn’t they?” Estresor Fil shot back. “And they saved the world. And your whales. I would certainly consider that a success by any reckoning.”

  “You’re right,” Dennis agreed, still chuckling. “They pulled it off. And we don’t even have to travel back into the past to do it, so I’m sure we’ll be just fine.”

  “Who’s in command?” Boon asked. Even though the others had voted him Squadron Leader, when they faced group activities they rotated command positions so that everyone got a fair chance to lead.

  “It’s our final project,” Felicia Mendoza pointed out. “I thought you’d be champing at the bit. Are you suggesting otherwise?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” Boon said. “Certainly I’m the best qualified. But if somebody else has a particular interest in the job, that’s fine too.”

  There was a moment of silence as all the cadets in the room glanced around at one another. Will felt a number of eyes on him and thought that maybe he should challenge Boon for the leadership position this time. Boon generally believed that he was born to lead, and took that role whenever the opportunity came up. But Will was convinced that on a starship, anyone could be thrust by circumstance into the captain’s chair, and no one who graduated from Starfleet Academy should be unfamiliar with the demands of the job.

  “I think it should be Dennis,” he said at last, breaking the silence. The look on Boon’s face was one for the books—crestfallen and amazement battling for supremacy, with fury threatening to break through at any time. He actually bit his lower lip, trying to control his expression.

  “Dennis?” Boon asked, unable to keep the disbelief from his voice. “Why?”

  “Because he hasn’t been in charge on any of our group projects to date,” Will said. “And this is the last group project before the end of the year. Everyone needs to get a taste of leadership, and this will be his last chance with this squadron.” What he didn’t add was that he knew Dennis would ne
ver have nominated himself for the position. He was a get-along, go-along kind of guy, never wanting to make waves, always content to be in the back of the pack as long as he was included. Starfleet needed people like that, of course—there were a lot of crew members to every captain, and a lot of captains to every admiral—but every crew member would perform better if he or she understood the captain’s position too.

  “Will, I don’t know—” Dennis began, but Felicia cut him off.

  “I second the nomination,” she said. “Will’s right. It really is your turn, Dennis.”

  Dennis’s cheeks flushed, but he went silent. Estresor Fil was the next to speak. “Dennis can do the job as well as anyone else,” she insisted.

  Boon looked defeated. “If that’s what you guys think, well, it’s fine with me.” His tone indicated that it wasn’t fine, but that he wasn’t about to make a big deal about it this time. “Just keep in mind, it’s the final project of the year, and it’s Admiral Paris’s pet project. So it’s going to be a big part of our grades in his class.”

  The others expressed their assent, so finally Dennis, cheeks crimsoning until they almost matched Boon’s, accepted. “Okay,” he said enthusiastically. “I’ll do it. With all of us working together, I think this one will be a breeze.”

  I wouldn’t be so sure, Will thought, thinking about stories he’d heard of past years. There seemed to be a lot that could go wrong with these missions. He wasn’t going to say anything that might undermine Dennis’s confidence, though. Especially since he was the one who had put Dennis’s abilities on the line by nominating him.

  But I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

  Chapter 3

  He knows. Kyle Riker knows now that he is a target. In some ways, that will make the rest of it easier. So far, we’ve had to operate in absolute secrecy, to make our moves slowly and quietly, keeping everything under wraps until the timing was right. But now, everything can be done in the open. Riker can be made to suffer—has to be made to suffer—as others have suffered on his account.