THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST

by Susan Wright

  Reoh’s throat closed shut. More spiritual! He was supposed to speak after Captain Picard! No!

  But the eyes of the cadets were urging him toward the stage. As he slowly made his way forward, he realized that many of the cadets knew him, more than he would have imagined. And he recognized the two people in the front row from their similarity to Titus, family members who had probably come for the memorial. How could he speak—he couldn’t even think!

  Somehow he made it to the stage, where Captain Picard shook his hand, resting his other on Reoh’s shoulder. Reoh looked into his captain’s eyes, remembering in a rush the first day he had met Picard, reporting to duty on the Enterprise. It had felt as if, with one keen glance, Picard had taken his measure as a man.

  Now he felt reassured by Picard’s sympathy, and by his murmured assurance, “Speak your heart.”

  Reoh returned the pressure of his hand, straightening up. “Serving you was an honor, sir.”

  Picard smiled, accepting Reoh’s acknowledgment.

  Then he was facing the grand assembly hall, row after row of silent cadets, jammed in so tight that they were sitting in the aisles and standing along the sides and in the doorways. He knew his image appeared on every screen in the Academy, and everyone was watching because everyone knew Titus.

  “We all miss Titus,” he said, his voice breaking a little. “The fact that I am standing up here today is a testament to his ability to draw people to him, to add everyone who came within his reach to his vast network of friends and allies. As far as I could tell, he only had one requirement for friendship. That you always do your best, and try your hardest to overcome your own limitations and those of others.”

  Nev Reoh ducked his head for a moment, hearing perfect silence. “He once told me that he joined Starfleet because we were given the freedom to work for our rights, and unlike most people he knew, he didn’t believe those rights should be given to him or anyone. He was always more than willing to work for what he believed in, and to tell others they should work for what they believed in. Some people were irritated by his bluntness, his honesty—I don’t know, I always treasured that about him because I always knew exactly where I stood with him.” Reoh realized he was choking up. “We still need Titus, but now we’ll have to carry on his work for him, instead of with him.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Final Year, 2371-72

  A SHADOW PASSED over the window of Nev Reoh’s tiny associate professor’s office in the geophysics building. The structure had sloped sides, and the antigrav boarders couldn’t seem to resist using the updraft to skim their boards high into the air.

  Nev Reoh cringed as yet another one went by. His office was on the fourth floor, higher than most antigrav boards were designed to go. He could hear the whine as the gears tried to resist the updraft. And the laughter of the boarders, floating near the first floor, taunting their friends to more daring heights.

  It was the weekend, so most of the professors were gone. Reoh was only working because he didn’t have much else to do but grade papers, so he put his heart into it. He was turning away to call security to chase the cadets from the dangerous geophysics building, when his eye caught sight of Starsa’s long, burnished-gold hair flying through the air.

  Starsa skimmed her antigrav board away, then turned, pausing for a moment, her teeth biting into her lip as she judged the building.

  Reoh called out, “No!” but she couldn’t hear him. She probably couldn’t even see him through the tinted glass.

  His hands gripped the windowsill as she began her run. Balancing beautifully, her board ran straight toward the windows, turning at the last moment as she swooped up the side of the building. Somewhere near the fifth floor, the gyros cut out, flipping the top edge of the board away from the wall.

  Starsa tried to turn it into a loop, but she was so high that it was actually a dive. Her foot slipped out of the notch and the grav board twisted out from under her. She fell past the board, catching it with one hand as the safeties quickly sank them toward the ground.

  Starsa let out a yell, trying to grab hold of the board with both hands to let it carry her down. Nev Reoh was pressed against the window, and he could see the white skin of her fingers as they slipped off one by one.

  “Aahh!” she screamed as she fell the last two stories.

  Reoh would have leaped out the window after her if he could. He pressed up against the plasteel, trying to see if she was dead. But her continued screams echoed against the wall of the geophysics building, assuring him that she was alive.

  By the time he got to the ground floor, medics had beamed to the site. Reoh had to shove through a loose group of off-duty cadets to see Starsa. She was white, even her lips, and her eyes were glazed from the contents of the hypospray that had just been administered to her neck. He could understand why. Her bare leg was tattered and twisted in an odd angle in two places.

  Starsa didn’t like the clear brace the doctors had insisted she wear on her leg for a couple of weeks. They explained that her physiology required extra care to ensure that the bone healed properly. Meanwhile, she couldn’t bend her knee, and the thing threw off her balance when she tried to do a loop-the-loop on her antigrav board.

  “Starsa!” someone screamed at her, making her lose her balance. “Stop that!”

  She hopped off her board, with the brace making her hobble a few feet forward before she came to a complete stop. “What?”

  Reoh came running towards her, clutching a bundle of padds in one arm. “What are you doing?” He looked around at the others. “How could you let her ride her board with a cast on?”

  The other cadets shrugged and mumbled, fading away in the face of an angry professor. Reoh acted like he had forgotten he was an authority figure now. “You know you aren’t supposed to grav board for another ten days. At least not until that leg is healed.”

  “I’m fine,” she told him, not at all impressed with his new rank. “You spoiled the fun.”

  “What’s gotten into you lately, Starsa? You never used to be this reckless—”

  Starsa flipped her board over and jumped on, banking it in the air. “Everyone should learn to relax a little, Nev. That includes you.”

  Without a farewell, she swerved and skimmed off, over the tops of some Triskel bushes imported from Ventax II. She knew Reoh was just concerned about her. He had spent hours accompanying her through the medical regeneration, and she had been grateful for the company.

  But to Starsa, it felt like she was back in her first year in the Academy instead of finishing her last. Back then, everyone was acting all repressed and gloomy over the flying accident in the Saturn fields that had killed Joshua Albert. Now, the year she would graduate, aside from the grief over Titus’s death and the disappearance of the crew on Voyager, there were the growing fears about the rise of the Dominion. It was like a shadow cast over Starfleet itself, making everyone frightened.

  Starsa banked and returned to the small square she had just sailed through. The signal for a general announcement was on the air. She jumped off and ran a few steps, next to the cadets gathered in front of the screen. Usually Admiral Brand or one of the Academy officials appeared, but this time Admiral Leyton was in the midst of announcing:

  “. . . a joint strike force, consisting of the Romulan Tal Shiar and the Cardassian Obsidian Order, was ambushed near the Founders’ homeworld in the Omarion Nebula.” Leyton took a deep breath, the lines in his forehead deepening. “The Federation did not participate in this secret strike force against the Dominion, and Starfleet sent no ships until the Defiant was called to the Gamma Quadrant to rescue the two sole survivors. The destruction of both the Cardassian and Romulan elite forces will surely be a factor in galactic politics in the coming months.”

  Admiral Leyton’s blue eyes stared out of the screen as if he wanted to say more, but he simply shifted and the screen returned to the blue Starfleet symbol.

  “Well, there goes all the fun,” Starsa blurted out
.

  “Be quiet, Starsa!” one of the other cadets ordered. “This is serious.”

  A few of the younger cadets were looking at her, so she shrugged and gave them a wry smile. They didn’t smile back, obviously too intimidated by the hushed voices of the other senior cadets.

  “Lighten up,” Starsa muttered, jumping back on her grav board, feeling unusually irritated with the world.

  Jayme returned from a relaxing vacation with Moll during the midwinter break to find several communiques from Nev Reoh, asking her to contact him. She went straight to his office in the geophysics building.

  “Hey,” she said, first thing, “you should get hold of Enor if you want to send anything back to your family on Bajor. She’s going to replace an assistant on the Federation science team at DS9 for a few weeks, monitoring the wormhole.”

  Reoh shook his head. “I don’t have any family on Bajor.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Jayme said. “You went back for six months that one time, didn’t you?”

  “It’s required. Part of being Bajoran means you have to see the holy sites.” He shrugged. “It also made it real to me, to know for certain that we had gotten our world back.”

  Jayme remembered how happy he had been last semester when the Bajorans signed a peace treaty with the Cardassians. “Now they’ve got the Jem ‘Hadar breathing down their necks, not to mention all those Klingon birds-of-prey flying through their system. I guess that’s what Admiral Leyton meant when he said the failed strike force would change galactic politics.”

  Nev Reoh nodded, looking down at his hands.

  “So what did you want?” Jayme asked.

  “Nothing so important,” Reoh told her, downplaying everything, as usual.

  “I have to study, Reoh. What is it?”

  “You know that virus that sometimes switches a paragraph from your old personal logs with someone else’s?”

  “Yeah, that’s happened since my first year, every few months or so. More often lately. Some glitch, they say, in the Academy computer system.”

  “I think I found out what it really is,” he told her.

  “Oh? Then maybe you should tell programming—”

  “It’s Starsa.”

  Jayme’s mouth twisted. “No . . .”

  “Yes. I didn’t think about it until this odd sentence appeared in one of my old logs. Then I realized that my logs didn’t start skipping until my third year. The same year I was in the same quad as Starsa.”

  “That’s not enough reason to blame her! I know she’s a lunatic sometimes, but that would take . . .”

  “A lot of effort, to have kept it up for almost four years.” Reoh called up the skipped paragraph he had found. “Read this.”

  Jayme bent closer and read:

  “I can’t believe nobody’s figured it out yet. I always have to ask people if their logs have skipped before they start to talk about it.”

  She straightened up, furrowing her brow. It’s true, nobody looked much in their old logs, even the most recent ones. And Jayme always seemed to hear about it from Starsa first.

  “She wouldn’t dare!” Jayme breathed in disbelief.

  “I checked,” Reoh agreed, “and of the three-hundred-and-forty-seven cadets who have reported this skip virus, all of them were either in one of Starsa’s classes or on a project she worked on.”

  “She’s been gathering people for years!” Jayme exclaimed. “That little slime devil!”

  Reoh was shaking his head. “I don’t understand why she would expose her own personal logs to the virus.”

  Jayme was reading the sentence again, laughing at how much it sounded like Starsa. “The risk of being caught is part of the fun. Besides, she wants to read someone else’s paragraph as much as we all do. Don’t you run to your logs to check when you hear it’s happened?”

  “She has to stop,” Reoh said, ignoring the question.

  “Fine, you talk to her.”

  “Starsa doesn’t listen to me. She wouldn’t even stop when I told her not to ride her grav board with her cast on.”

  “Everyone tried to tell her that,” Jayme reminded him. “She never listens.”

  “I’ll have to inform Admiral Brand,” he said slowly. “It wouldn’t be good for Starsa to get away with something like this. Do you think she needs counseling?”

  “Hey, we all need counseling for one thing or another.”

  “I’m worried about her,” he insisted.

  Jayme tried not to laugh. “Then talk to her. Do what you have to do. But if it happens again, I’ll tell everyone it was Starsa who did it.”

  Reoh walked her to the door. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Ohh . . . you sounded very professorial there.” Reoh blushed, but it reminded Jayme of something else. “I almost forgot, have you heard anything about this Red Squad?”

  “I heard when Johnny Madden made the Squad,” he admitted. “I checked, but it’s not an official Academy designation.”

  “Maybe not, but they’re sent on special trips and field training as a group. You have to be recommended by a high-ranking officer in Starfleet, so it might be something new they formed for us cadets.”

  “Have you been asked?”

  “No!” Jayme shrugged, figuring she should ask some of her relatives. “I think it’s elitist.”

  “I’ll see if I can find out more,” Nev Reoh promised.

  Jayme had to smile. “Thanks. With you on the job, I feel I have nothing to fear.”

  Reoh tried to talk to Starsa on the grand square, but she only wanted to know how he had discovered the log skips were caused by her. She also wanted to know what Jayme had said, and she kept laughing.

  Reoh became impatient, and finally he snapped at her, “Do you want to die, like Titus?”

  Starsa blinked at him, then her eyes filled with tears. She sat down on the bench, her head in her hands.

  “I’m sorry, Starsa,” Reoh told her helplessly.

  “He’s dead!” she said, looking up with a tear-stained face. “It’s worse now, you know? At first it seemed like I’d see him any day. He’d appear behind me and pull my ponytail or call me a pest. But now I know he’s never coming back.”

  Reoh sat down next to her. “Is Titus the first person you’ve ever known who died?”

  Starsa nodded, wiping her eyes.

  “It’s not something you ever get used to,” he told her. “That’s why I worry about you so much. You do these dangerous things for no reason. It could have been your head you broke instead of your leg when you fell off your grav board. And you could get into real trouble if you keep doing things like sending a virus through the computer system.”

  Starsa didn’t look up, her brow furrowed. “It’s just a joke.”

  “I don’t understand you, Starsa. You’ve never let your pursuit of fun override your good sense. How many times in the past few months have you made the logs skip? Three times? It’s like you wanted to get caught.”

  Starsa stood up with a huge sigh. “If you’re just going to counsel me, I might as well go confess to Admiral Brand and get my official counseling over with.”

  Reoh tried to stop her. “Don’t go, Starsa. Talk to me about this—”

  “Gotta run.” She grinned, that old sly look in her eyes. “You never know what trouble I could find between here and Brand’s office.”

  He couldn’t keep her from jumping on her grav board and taking off. She skimmed around two cadets, then did a somersault over the fountain, making his heart leap into his throat. Then, with a wave, she was gone.

  He sat back down, his heart pounding. Starsa had never been cruel before. Thoughtless, yes, but no one could ever call her unkind.

  “That girl has a problem,” someone said from behind the bench.

  Reoh turned to see Boothby, the oldest gardener at the Academy. “Hi, Boothby. Haven’t seen you lately.”

  “Been tending a hillside of blueberries behind the recycling center,” he said, very sat
isfied with himself. “I see you’re taking up cadet counseling on the side.”

  Reoh shifted, remembering how he used to come to Boothby when he needed advice. “It’s part of my job. Do you want to know something? I’ve been chosen to be the cadet advisor for an incoming student—a Ferengi. He’s the first Ferengi to apply to Starfleet, but he used to live on DS9, so they thought a Bajoran would be a familiar face for him.”

  “What is this place coming to?” Boothby said in mock-wonder. “But I know nothing will top our first Klingon cadet.”

  “What about a Borg cadet?” Reoh offered. “Or a shape-shifter?”

  “We can only hope it comes to that,” Boothby agreed seriously. He cleared his throat. “About that girl; she’s in big trouble.”

  “Oh, Brand will give her a reprimand and some community service. I’m afraid she’ll enjoy the attention more than anything.”

  Boothby shook his head. “No, she’s in trouble. She needs help.”

  “Help? What kind of help?”

  “Medical help, if you ask me,” Boothby said.

  “You think she’s sick?” Reoh knew better than to question Boothby. “I thought she’d been acting oddly, but nobody would believe me.”

  Boothby shouldered his spade. “See what you can do about getting her to a doctor.”

  “Of course!” He started toward the medical building. “I’ll tell them to call her in right now!”

  Starsa didn’t like doctors. She had never been sick in her life until she left her homeworld and went to the Academy. Then it had taken nine long months for her to acclimate, and she had hardly been able to run up a flight of stairs without killing herself. She hated her medical monitor so much that, when they told her she no longer needed it, instead of turning the device back in she had thrown it off the top of Quad Tower Two.

  So, at first, she resisted being called in by the doctors to be prodded and analyzed again. But when they started giving her hormone and biocellular treatments, she began to realize how ill she really was.