by Peter David
“That’s right,” Shelby told him. “That’s the point of it: that there is no point to it. When life seems completely pointless, it’s nice to have a place to go that serves no other purpose than to look nice and be green. It’s a calming, steadying influence.”
“I find little about it calming,” said Calhoun.
“You’ll get used to it,” assured Shelby.
He shrugged. “If you say so.”
“You know, Calhoun, I’m surprised to see you here,” said Wexler, coming around the other side of the bench. “You’ve had your nose buried in text for most of the week. I’m surprised you came up for air.”
“I’m practicing,” said Calhoun.
Shelby and Wexler exchanged looks. “Practicing?” said Shelby. “Practicing what?”
“Reading.”
“Reading?” Again they looked at each other, this time with utter perplexity. “What do you mean you’re practicing reading?”
“Universal Translators are all well and good for speaking,” said Calhoun, “but reading remains a learned skill.”
“You mean you’re illiterate?”
“I read Xenexian,” Calhoun said, sounding a bit defensive. “But it’s very…what’s the word? Simplistic. A very simplistic language in comparison. Mostly symbols.”
“You have an entire civilization built upon a language of symbols?” said an astonished Wexler. “Calhoun, no offense, mate…but what sort of society can accomplish anything of substance or lasting importance without any—” and then with no pause he continued, as Shelby glared at him, “—and I’m totally forgetting the Egyptians, who were a remarkably progressive society and left works of architectural magnificence which last to this day, and I feel it would be wisest if I shut up about now.”
“Go with the feeling,” Shelby told him.
Calhoun glanced suspiciously from one to the other, and then continued, “A…friend of mine arranged for me to go to a facility before I arrived here. I was there for several months, and during that time, accelerated learning techniques were used to teach me to read. But it’s still a lot to absorb.”
“I’d think so,” said Shelby in wonderment. “I’m…that’s…it’s very impressive, Mackenzie. What you’re doing.”
And then a voice came from behind them. “Oh, absolutely. Very impressive.”
Shelby turned and saw about half a dozen senior cadets approaching them. They were grinning, but there was no air of pleasantry in the grin. She didn’t know any of them offhand, but that wasn’t surprising. She’d hardly had the chance to meet anyone so far.
“So you just learned to read,” said the one in the forefront, and there was cold anger in his expression, and a bruise on his cheek, and Shelby instantly put two and two together and realized this had to be Joshua Kemper. And he had friends. A lot of friends. “As the young lady said, Calhoun: impressive. Any other recently acquired skills we should know about? Cutting your own food, perhaps? And…you are housebroken, I hope. Wouldn’t want any unfortunate accidents.”
“No. We wouldn’t,” said Calhoun. And Shelby saw Calhoun get up from the bench. Something changed in his deep purple eyes then. A coldness emanated from them, as if he was taking something out of himself and locking it away so it wouldn’t get in his way.
And what was that “something”? Hesitation. Uncertainty. The air of civilization. Or perhaps something as simple as mercy or pity.
Kemper and his friends had stopped several feet away, and then Wexler interposed himself. He stuck out a hand and said, “Hello. Vincent Wexler’s the name. Glad to be here and am very much looking forward to the—”
“Quiet, Cadet,” said Kemper.
“Right, then,” Wexler said instantly, and stepped back.
Kemper swiveled his gaze to Shelby. “And you are?”
“Elizabeth Paula Shelby,” she said. Her gaze was steady, her shoulders square. She kept reminding herself that this was Starfleet Academy, not a school playground. Certainly there had to be a higher standard for behavior at the former than one would find in the latter. Then again, the hormonal drive of men—be they human or Xenexian—and the folly that drive led them to, was rapidly appearing to be a universal constant.
“Welcome to the Academy, Shelby…Wexler.” He nodded to each of them, but he never took his eyes off the Xenexian. “And Calhoun…we’ve already had the pleasure.”
Calhoun said nothing. Just watched him.
Kemper rubbed his jaw. “Good work, eh? You’ll find the medical facilities at the Academy are top-notch. You’d never know it was broken.”
This time Calhoun did speak. “I’d know. I broke it.”
“Yes. Yes, you did. A lucky punch while I wasn’t looking.”
“Is that what you’re telling people?” asked Calhoun.
“Cadet, I can’t say I like your tone of voice. Perhaps it’d be best if you said nothing at all for the moment.”
Shelby was certain that, at that point, Calhoun was going to launch himself at Kemper. She could almost see the muscles straining for the lunge. His fists were clenched and the knuckles worked against each other. But then slowly the fists unclenched, and Calhoun remained exactly where he was. It was an impressive display of self-control.
Kemper actually seemed a bit surprised that Calhoun had indeed reined himself in. “Well…that’s wise, Cadet. Not quite so precipitous when you’re outnumbered, are you.”
If Calhoun’s gaze had been capable of generating the actual cold that was coming from it, Kemper would have been an icicle. Shelby saw the direction the situation was heading. Sooner or later, Calhoun was going to be goaded into attacking Kemper, who had targeted the Xenexian for singular “attention.” And when Calhoun did that, he would get the crap kicked out of him by the six-to-one odds. And then he’d be expelled. Whatever odds he’d managed to beat for striking Kemper once, he’d never be able to get away with it a second time.
She didn’t want that to happen. It seemed too unfair. Too arbitrary. Someone who worked that hard learning to read—something that the rest of them took for granted—deserved his opportunity.
“This is supposed to be a relaxing party,” Shelby spoke up, “and in this cadet’s opinion, this isn’t—”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion, Cadet. Did I?”
“No, sir, but I—”
“At attention, Cadet.”
Reflexively, Shelby snapped to attention. Arms at her side, looking straight ahead.
Kemper slowly circled her, studying her intently. “Very good. Someone who knows how to obey orders. I hope you’re taking notes on her behavior, Calhoun. She’s someone on whom you should model yourself. And she seems concerned about you. That’s commendable as well. But you know what? Standing at attention for too long can make the muscles stiffen up. Doesn’t seem fair. Cadet Shelby: jumping jacks, until I say otherwise. Commencing now.”
Instantly Shelby started doing jumping jacks.
There’s always going to be one. The words of her father came to her un-bidden. There’s always going to be one upperclassman. Someone who takes it upon himself to show plebes exactly who’s boss. He will throw arbitrary orders at you, lord it over you. And he will do so in the firm belief that he is doing you a favor. That he’s indoctrinating you, teaching you strict adherence to the chain of command in a way that professors can’t. Because that chain of command can and will save your life. You may want to ignore him, to disobey him, to fight him. Instead, tolerate him. Tolerate him and deal with him in a professional manner, since if you can’t handle something as mundane as an officious superior, then you’ll never be able to deal with something as challenging as the vacuum of space.
Her face set, she continued the jumping jacks. They weren’t especially difficult; she was in excellent shape. She felt slow, burning anger within her, but she pushed it aside, remembering what her father said.
She looked to Wexler to say something, do something. She didn’t know what that might be, but he was clever. He could
come up with something. Instead he just stood there, looking saddened, even pitying. He pitied her. That made her stomach tighten, and she wanted to shout at him even though it was unreasonable to do so. He hadn’t gotten her into this fix; she had done it herself. All herself. In this cadet’s opinion. What had she been thinking? Kemper had a bone to pick with Calhoun, she’d gotten in the way of that, and now she was paying the price. As her arms and legs scissored, she thought, Let that be a lesson to you. Stay out of the line of fire when some idiot superior is on the warpath….
And suddenly rough-hewn hands were grabbing her, and she realized Calhoun was facing her, gripping her shoulders firmly and forcing her to stand still. She was completely taken aback. He wasn’t that much taller than she, didn’t look especially bulky. Yet she was completely immobilized by him. Whatever muscle he had must have been like corded steel.
“What the hell are you doing, Cadet?” demanded Kemper. “Preventing another cadet from obeying orders—?”
Calhoun turned and spat out, “Coward.”
“Calhoun,” Shelby tried to warn him off, but he’d have none of it. She felt as if she were inside a shuttle spiraling downward in a death roll.
“Coward?” Kemper walked slowly toward him, and there was genuine delight in his face. “You call me coward?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“You should be.”
That threw Kemper off his step for a moment, but he recovered quickly. “Well, well. Aren’t you full of yourself. You are aware that this time you don’t have the element of surprise?”
There was not the slightest hesitation on Calhoun’s part. He moved Shelby to one side and faced Kemper squarely.
“I don’t need it,” he said.
“Calhoun, that’s enough,” said Shelby, trying to pull him away. “Get into a fight, they’ll kick you out.” But he wasn’t budging. She might as well have been trying to move one of the Easter Island statues.
Then he looked at her with a face as inscrutable as one of those statues. “Right and wrong doesn’t make allowance for consequences.”
“Cadet Calhoun,” said Kemper, “I am dealing with Cadet Shelby. Are you going to cease and desist in this interference or not?”
“No.” And then as an afterthought, he added, “Sir.” Shelby had to admit she was surprised. She’d never have thought he’d give even that much of a nod to respect where Kemper was concerned.
“Gentlemen,” said Kemper, nodding toward Calhoun, “escort Mr. Calhoun out of the way, please. He’s interfering with the chain of command.”
The upperclassmen came around from either side, reaching out with the clear intention of taking Calhoun by either arm. One of them gripped Calhoun firmly by the wrist.
That was a mistake.
Instantly Calhoun reached around with his free hand and locked it around the hand on his wrist. This confused the upperclassman for as long as it took Calhoun to twist his encumbered arm around and down, and suddenly the upperclassman let out a startled shriek, the weight of his own body applying extreme pressure to his arm. He bent in half and Calhoun drove a knee up into his face. There was a snap as the upperclassman’s nose broke and Calhoun shoved him aside, sending him tumbling to the ground.
The entire move took just over a second.
The man who’d been coming in from the other side didn’t have time to register what had just happened before Calhoun whirled and drove a foot into his stomach. He doubled over and Calhoun swung an uppercut, catching him square in the chin and knocking him backward.
“Get him!” shouted Kemper, and all the games were over as the remaining men rushed him. Calhoun turned to greet their rush, and Shelby didn’t see fear or even anger in his face. Instead a grim smile was playing across his lips. He was happy for this. Thrilled for it. He was in his element.
He met the attack, one against four, and went straight for Kemper. The speed of his charge drove Kemper back, away from the others. To Kemper’s credit, he blocked the first several of Calhoun’s punches and even landed one himself. It glanced off Calhoun’s face, just above the scar. Calhoun didn’t even seem to feel it.
And then Calhoun picked him up.
Shelby couldn’t believe it, had never seen anything like it. “Compact,” “wiry”—these were the words she would have used to describe Mackenzie Calhoun. But that wouldn’t have begun to cover what she witnessed now as Calhoun grabbed Kemper by the waist and by the back of the neck and lifted him clear off the ground, over his head. Kemper kicked frantically in midair, helpless as a child, and the only acknowledgment of the weight he was bearing was the slightest grunt from Calhoun.
At that instant there was no doubt in Shelby’s mind that he would have thrown Kemper to the ground as hard as he could and conceivably shattered his spine, his skull—anything breakable in his body.
Then the other three upperclassmen slammed into Calhoun, bowling him over. Kemper fell out of his grasp and hit the ground. Calhoun rolled over onto his back, brought his legs up and under his chin, and thrust upward. One of the cadets fell back and Calhoun grabbed the two others by either side of their heads and cracked their skulls together.
But the battle had been enough to attract other upperclassmen as well, friends of Kemper’s by the look of them. They poured out of the hall and Calhoun lunged to his feet to meet them. His uniform was a colorful mingling of grass stains and bloodstains, and his upper lip was drawn back into a disdainful snarl, but his eyes remained level and he didn’t even seem to be breathing hard.
The upperclassmen converged from in front and behind, and Calhoun almost managed to dodge to one side to get out of their way. If he had done so, there was no telling how long he might have held them off. But luck went against him as his toe snagged the root of a tree, and Calhoun went down. Instantly the pile of senior students was upon him, pinning him down. Other first-year students were now visible at the outer edge of the gardens, but they simply stood there and watched.
He never cried out, never shouted for help. Not once. It was entirely possible that doing so never even occurred to him.
Help came anyway.
Shelby charged the pileup and grabbed the first person she could find from behind. She clamped her arm around his throat and pulled, and he came off with a strangled yelp as she tossed him aside and started hammering on the backs of the others. She caught a glimpse of Calhoun below her. He wasn’t shielding his head as another might do, trying to withstand the storm of fists upon him. Instead he was swinging wildly, lashing out, not caring who struck him. As if he felt that they couldn’t possibly do him any damage.
And suddenly other first-years were there, including Wexler. They came in, and what they lacked in knowledge of self-defense, they made up for in sheer enthusiasm. Within moments the entire area had been reduced to a melee, and even after the teachers and deans finally arrived to break the whole thing up, the general consensus by everyone who attended was that this was, quite simply, the best Starfleet Academy mill-and-swill they’d had in years.
Chapter Four
Now
Zak Kebron had never admitted it to anyone, but he had a morbid fascination with old Earth murder mysteries.
His interest had gone all the way back to the Academy, when his roommate Worf had been reading one and sniffed disdainfully when he finished with it. Kebron had glanced over questioningly as Worf had tossed the reading padd onto the table between their beds. “A singular waste of energy,” Worf had said.
“What?”
“The man in that book murders someone who was endeavoring to steal his spouse from him, and then spends the rest of the tale trying to cover it up, only to be found out by a detective in the end through some foolish mistake he let slip.”
Kebron stared at the padd. “So?”
“He killed an enemy,” Worf said with greater insistence, as if Kebron hadn’t heard him the first time. “Why would he try to hide such a thing? He should boast of his accomplishm
ent and use it as a warning to any others who might attempt to abscond with the affections of his mate. And this detective was a shambling, confusing, and annoying little man who boasted repeatedly of his ‘little gray cells.’ Not at all a worthy opponent.”
Kebron had taken that in for a moment, then picked up the padd and looked at Worf questioningly. “Be my guest,” Worf had said.
Whereupon the Brikar read the novel and had a reaction that was 180 degrees from the Klingon’s. He found it fascinating, engrossing. The step-by-step solving of the mystery intrigued him no end. He did, however, agree with Worf in one respect. The detective was annoying.
But then he had stumbled upon other books in this genre referred to as “mystery.” And there was a subgenre that intrigued him all the more: “hard-boiled detectives.” Writers and detectives such as Raymond Chandler’s “Philip Marlowe,” Dashiell Hammett’s “Sam Spade,” Max Allan Collins’s “Nate Heller,” Robert Crais’s “Elvis Cole,” and of course the greatest of them all, Tracy Tormé’s “Dixon Hill.”
They had appealed to Kebron because they threw themselves into their cases, they were hardheaded, no one could stop them, and they always got to the truth of the matter. Best of all, they did not hesitate to smack people around in the pursuit of a case’s solution, a tactic that far more effete detectives in other, less worthy works would never even dream of utilizing.
In short, they used the direct approach. Kebron liked that. A lot.
It wasn’t as if Kebron was happy that an officer had been murdered. Murders were anarchic deeds and were not at all in keeping with the safe, secure running of a starship. Still, the prospect of investigating one, particularly when the odds were so stacked against the suspected killer, greatly appealed to him. He’d read enough detective novels to know that the obvious suspect was never the one who had actually performed the fatal deed. That the first person accused was always a red herring to throw pursuers off the scent. Usually it was a trick concocted by the genuine perpetrator. Solving a murder involved determining not simply opportunity and motive for the killer himself, but also opportunity and motive for the person who was accused. Trying to determine who might have it in for Gleau was one thing. But figure out who both resented Gleau and would also want to see Janos framed for it, and that would invariably lead Kebron to the guilty party.