Deny Thy Father

by Jeff Mariotte

  “What took you so long?” he wanted to know.

  “We came as quickly as we could,” Lt. Aronson assured him. “We were the nearest Starfleet ship, but we were still quite a distance away.”

  “When we joined the Federation,” Luwadis said, “I thought we’d be better served by our membership. But this…leaving us with this killer on our hands…”

  “Sir, we’re here to take him off your hands.” Lt. Aronson spoke with a soothing tone, but Luwadis was not easily soothed.

  Glancing at the surroundings, Will began to understand his problem. This was not a highly developed world. Advanced enough to qualify for Federation membership, but probably just barely. The structure they were in, the main prison administration building, was made of stone. The office was full of uniformed, armed guards, but their weapons looked relatively primitive compared to the phaser rifle in Will’s hands. Even Luwadis’s clothing, a coppery suit a few shades darker than his skin, looked rough-hewn, as if it had been made by hand, by someone not particularly skilled or imaginative.

  “You can understand how they feel,” Luwadis went on, waving a hand toward the large glass doors that led out onto a balcony. “The mob, I mean. Plure has killed more of us than anyone wants to think about. The mob wants him dead. So do I, for that matter. But we’ve agreed, by joining the Federation, to abide by Federation standards of justice. Plure should have a trial, and then he should be punished. Without that, there will be no guarantee that he is, in fact, the one responsible for all the crimes he’s been accused of. I’d rather have certainty than a quick death, even in this case.”

  “You made the right decision,” Aronson said. “He’ll have a fair trial. If he’s guilty—which, on the face of it, seems pretty evident—he’ll be punished appropriately.”

  “Appropriately?” Luwadis echoed. “Can he be killed seven hundred thousand times?”

  “I don’t know much about his physiology, sir,” Aronson replied. “But I’d guess he can only be killed once.”

  “Yes, yes, which is why you’ve got to get him out of here.”

  Will noticed that Zaffos, probably made curious by Luwadis’s gesture toward the balcony, had edged closer to the doors there. Will started to move, as subtly as he could, to intercept Zaffos if he should decide to go outside. But the continued conversation between Luwadis and Aronson had distracted him, and Zaffos took two quick steps before Will could stop him.

  “Wow,” he heard Zaffos say. “He’s not kidding.”

  Will lunged onto the balcony. He spared only a glance toward the prison walls. Beyond them, what looked like thousands—tens of thousands, maybe—teemed, pressing up against the walls as if trying to knock them down by sheer weight of numbers. Will grabbed Zaffos’s gold-sleeved arm and tugged him toward the door. “Get back inside,” he urged. “We’re supposed to stay out of sight, remember?”

  “Here, here!” Luwadis shouted from inside the office. “Don’t go out there! If they see you—”

  Will and Zaffos stepped back inside and Will pushed the doors closed. But it was too late. A deafening cry rose up from the crowd on the other side of the walls. Will couldn’t make out many words, but he thought sure he heard “Starfleet” among the furious din.

  “I…I’m sorry,” Zaffos said quickly. “It’s my fault. I wanted to see.”

  Luwadis scowled at him. “You wanted to see? You wanted to touch off a riot, that’s what you wanted to do!”

  Will risked another glance outside. Luwadis was right. The mob’s angry cries had grown louder, and now he could see that some of them had gained the top of the wall. Prison guards were rushing to quell them, but they were vastly outnumbered and maybe even outgunned.

  “Get out,” Luwadis insisted. “Get out of here, and take Plure with you, or we’re all dead!”

  Four guards approached through an open doorway, surrounding a prisoner. Endyk Plure was as dangerous-looking as his reputation implied. He was a big, beefy individual, with coppery coloring similar to Luwadis’s. His muscles strained at the sleeves of the plain prison-issue tunic he wore. His face, unshaven for at least a week, was solid, jaw square, mouth cruel. His eyes were small and did not reflect much intelligence, Will thought, but maybe a vicious cunning. He stared defiantly at the Starfleet team that had come to collect him, but didn’t speak. Will knew that appearances could be deceiving, but in this case he was pretty sure that he could have picked Endyk out as a mass murderer in any lineup.

  “You’re coming with us, Plure,” Aronson said. “To stand trial in a Federation court for war crimes and mass murder.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Plure growled, his voice every bit as unpleasant as the rest of him. “Maybe you’ll introduce me to your family. The meals they serve here stink, and you look like some good eating.”

  Aronson ignored the taunt and touched his combadge. “Pegasus,” he said, “five to beam aboard.”

  As Will dematerialized, to arrive a moment later in the transporter room of the Pegasus, he thought he heard the terrible mob break through the prison walls. He hoped Luwadis could calm the mob before he and his guards had all been killed.

  Chapter 33

  There was little security in the psychiatric facility. Carson Cook wasn’t considered a danger to himself or anyone else. One had to have some kind of mental process to be dangerous. Carson was just a blank slate, and no one had written menace onto it. And psychiatric science was such that very few people needed to be confined. So Tanguy Messina was alone in the building with Carson Cook, and once Tanguy was dead, there was no one standing in his way.

  Carson walked away from the building rapidly, partly in order to put distance between himself and Messina’s body, but mainly to find and kill his next victim. There was menace in him now, certainly. He personified danger. He didn’t have a conscience—had he been asked, he wouldn’t have been able to define the word. He didn’t have a moral code or a set of ethical standards. All those things had been left behind in the man he had once been, but was no longer.

  Now, he was a targeted missile.

  At uneven intervals he received new information, helping him lock onto his target. As he walked, some people stared at him, he noticed. Eventually he figured out that it was his robe. He was naked underneath, and it wasn’t what they were wearing. When he came to that conclusion, his mind told him that he should do something about it. He needed to blend in if he was to reach his goal. He watched a man about his size enter a house, and as the man was just passing through the doorway, Carson rushed up the walk and hurled himself at the man. His momentum carried them both inside. The man cried out but Carson slammed a fist into the man’s throat, effectively silencing him. The man flailed at him. He was no soldier, though; he was weak, and soft. Carson smashed his head against the wall a few times, and it left a thick red smear when the man sank to the floor.

  The man’s clothes were torn and bloody now, but Carson understood that he was inside the man’s home. He went upstairs, found a closet full of similar suits, and put one on. With a tunic and pants of the same color, a pleasant royal blue, and a pair of actual boots, Carson figured he would look enough like anyone else on the street to withstand casual scrutiny. He looked around for a few more minutes, to see if there was anything else here that might be useful to him. He didn’t find anything, but so attired, he went back out into the city and waited for more instructions.

  A night passed, and a day, and then, as if he had always known it, he knew the location of his target. He knew what his target looked like, how he might be dressed, what the sound of his voice was. He went to his target’s approximate location, and he waited.

  And finally, his target showed.

  As promised, Kyle reported his new address to Owen Paris as soon as he’d secured an apartment. And as Owen had promised, he relayed the information to Starfleet Security, to personnel, to records—to virtually every department he could think of, short of writing it on the walls of Starfleet Headquarters in giant red letters. If t
here were going to be more attacks against Kyle, they would happen soon.

  They’d have to. Kyle had been feeling low-grade anxiety ever since he’d entered Earth’s orbit. He wanted to get this over with, once and for all, so he could go back to living his life.

  He spent the next day trying as best he could to put his affairs back into some kind of order. He retrieved his abandoned belongings from storage—his books, his maps, his clothing, some artwork, some sentimental items that reminded him of Annie, or Kate. To these, in his new home, he added the holoimage of Michelle. The three women he hadn’t proved worthy of. But maybe it wasn’t too late to try.

  His new apartment had a food replicator, but he was back in San Francisco, which was still one of the best places in the galaxy to get a fine meal. So that evening, instead of eating by himself in his apartment, he went out. He had his heart set on Italian—some capellini pomodoro, maybe, with a nice bottle of Saint Emilion, a favorite wine he’d introduced Owen Paris to over dinner a few years earlier.

  Notwithstanding his generalized anxiety and the grief that still clawed at his heart, Kyle felt better overall than he had since before the attack on Starbase 311. Even with all the horror he experienced there, the time on Hazimot had been healing and restful. He felt sharp, alert, and clear-headed. The hard manual labor he had done there had left him strong, with stamina he hadn’t enjoyed since he was much younger. And being back in San Francisco helped, too. He loved the city; always had. Its cool breezes, crazily diverse architecture, and almost uniquely polyglot population sang to him. As he walked down the street, confident that whatever Italian restaurant he came to first could provide an excellent meal, he felt almost happy again. He felt, at least, the possibility of happiness; no, the inevitability of it.

  Inevitability. He liked the sound of that. He even tried saying it out loud. He repeated it, almost like a mantra, inside his head as he approached a small storefront restaurant called Paolo’s, its sign glowing golden and inviting in the twilight.

  But before he reached Paolo’s, he saw a man coming toward him in an ill-fitting blue suit, a glazed expression on his face. This, he was pretty sure, was it. Maybe the first of many, but definitely an attack. You should have armed yourself, he thought bitterly. A phaser would make short work of this guy. He hadn’t wanted to be overly impulsive, though. Maybe the man was just lost, a stranger in town, confused and looking for a hand. The way Kyle had been feeling lately, he might have fired first, leaving San Francisco with one less tourist and himself with an even bigger problem.

  His muscles tensed, his heartbeat and respiration quickened. Still the man came toward him, not deviating from his path. His hands were clenching and releasing, and Kyle knew then that he was not wrong. He glanced around himself, rapidly, trying to determine whether or not this person was alone. It appeared that he was, so Kyle froze in position and let the man come to him.

  As he neared, steel flashed in his hands. The man carried a Ligonian knife, its blade wickedly curved, in his right hand. Kyle barely had time to register that when the man in blue sprang at him.

  Kyle dropped to a partial crouch, minimizing his target area and bringing his arms in front of himself for defense. Now Kyle recognized him: Carson Cook, the supposedly comatose security officer; Owen had sent over an image of him last night. Cook moved in fast, blade slashing wildly toward him. Kyle blocked the first attack with a blow to Cook’s forearm. Cook almost dropped the knife, but he recovered it and brought it down below Kyle’s waist level, then stabbed up, aiming for the ribs. Kyle caught Cook’s wrist, the knife’s point just nicking his own forearm as he did. With his other hand he reached for Cook’s throat. Cook dodged the arm, so Kyle, still gripping the wrist, kicked at Cook’s knee instead. The kick connected, hard, and Cook lost his footing. He fell to one knee and Kyle jerked his arm skyward, twisting as he did. Cook’s hand spasmed and the Ligonian knife went flying, landing on the street with a clatter.

  As soon as Kyle released his wrist, Cook lunged forward again, this time from his kneeling position. His mouth opened and he snapped at Kyle’s stomach. Kyle brought a knee up, smashing it into Cook’s jaw. Cook’s teeth crunched sickeningly and he swayed backward. Blood appeared at the corners of his mouth and he spat bits of tooth into the street, but he didn’t go down.

  Rather than wait for the next attack, Kyle doubled his fists together and swung them like a baseball bat, catching the side of Cook’s face. Cook’s head snapped sideways and the fight went out of him. He slumped to the street.

  Before Kyle could catch his breath, two Starfleet security officers ran up to him, phasers out and pointed at Cook. “You’re a little late,” Kyle said. “I thought you were supposed to protect me, not just clean up the mess afterward.”

  “Sorry, sir,” one of the security team said. Her hair was a mass of tight blond coils and her uniform sleeves bulged at the biceps. “We were trying to stay out of sight, to draw out your attacker. And then, well, it looked like you had things under control.”

  The other officer, a male with dark hair and a somber face, knelt down next to the body in the street. “It’s Carson Cook,” he said.

  The blonde nodded. “He escaped yesterday from the mental care facility he’s been living in,” she explained to Kyle. “Nobody thought he could so much as open a door.”

  “Apparently he’s better.”

  “Doesn’t look like it from here,” the male officer said. He held up Carson Cook’s head. Cook’s eyes were open but there was no spark of life in them. His mouth was slack, a mixture of blood and saliva running down his chin. The officer waved his hand in front of Cook’s eyes but they didn’t track, didn’t even blink. “He looks just the same as ever.”

  “But you saw him attack me,” Kyle insisted.

  “Yes, we saw it,” the blonde said. “Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  “Not a bit,” Kyle agreed. “But then, a lot of things about this whole situation haven’t made sense for a long time. That’s the only consistency, in fact.”

  “Well, maybe this will put an end to it,” the blonde officer suggested.

  Kyle shook his head. “No, it won’t. Cook’s just one man. He’s a tool, somehow, but he’s not what this is all about.”

  The officer shrugged. “One thing at a time, I guess. We’ll get him picked up and put back into custody. In a more secure facility, this time—he’s a murderer, now. And we’ll stick a little closer from now on.”

  “Sounds good,” Kyle said. “I was just going to Paolo’s there for some dinner. That shook up my appetite a bit but I think I can still eat.”

  “Let me have a look inside first, sir,” she said. “Just in case.”

  “Fine,” Kyle said. “Go ahead.”

  He glanced back at the male officer, who had just used his combadge to call for help removing Cook’s comatose body. But as Kyle watched, Cook—his eyes animated again—snatched the phaser from the officer’s holster and triggered it. The beam caught the male officer full in the torso. He screamed once and then fell onto the sidewalk, his uniform shirt smoldering.

  Cook turned the phaser toward Kyle, who dropped flat on the sidewalk just in time to miss the beam that shot over his head. Cook tracked him down and fired again. Kyle rolled to the side and the beam missed again, but not by much. Before Cook could aim again, a phaser blast caught him in the head. Cook twitched once, dropped the stolen phaser, and was still.

  “Damn!” the blonde said as she rushed to her partner’s side. “How do you keep up with that? One second he’s basically an empty shell, and the next he’s alert and deadly.”

  “I wish I knew,” Kyle admitted.

  She held two fingers against her partner’s neck. “He’s gone,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “Mack’s a great guy. Nice wife, terrific kids, the whole package, you know?”

  “I’m very sorry,” Kyle said. He wanted to be sympathetic, but at the same time he didn’t take his eyes off Cook, just in case.

  When t
he female officer spoke again, there was a new edge in her voice, of anger, even rage. “I don’t know what you’re mixed up in, sir, but it’s getting pretty expensive. First the attendant at the care facility, and now Mack.”

  Kyle put a hand on her shoulder, but kept an eye on Cook. He had hoped to be able to question his attacker—whoever it turned out to be. But even if Cook had survived the phaser blast, wherever his mind was, he was beyond interrogation. “I know it is,” he said softly. “It’s been expensive for a long time. If there’s a way to finish it, I’m going to find it, though. You can count on that.”

  Chapter 34

  Will was exhausted.

  The away party had taken more energy out of him than he’d anticipated. He hadn’t had to do much of anything, but the level of tension had been draining, and now that his shift was over all he wanted to do was hit the rack and sleep until he had to report for duty the next morning. The last hour or so on the bridge, flying out of the Candelar system, he’d barely been able to stifle his yawns. Captain Pressman, though, looked alert and crisp as ever, and Will hadn’t wanted to let on how tired he was.

  It was funny, he thought, how different the pace of life onboard was compared to the Academy. At the Academy, the day was broken up more—different classes, different faces, and different activities—so there was always variety. When he was on duty he was on the bridge most of the time, with the same crew and the same responsibilities, and at the end of the day he was almost always beat. He guessed he’d get used to it, and once he had a chance to start an exercise regime he’d have more energy. So far, though, that hadn’t happened, and it wouldn’t tonight.

  As he made his way down the corridor to his quarters, nodding to crew members whose names he was trying to keep straight in his head, he was stopped by a hand gripping his shoulder. “Will,” a voice said, “I just wanted to thank you.”