Seriously last. The more he contemplated it, the laster it got.
Tearing his gaze away from the waves, he removed a sheet of paper from inside the envelope. A stiff breeze from off the water tore at it, threatening to yank it from his grip. But the paper—really, he knew, a polymer with many of the same characteristics as the old-fashioned stuff, whose name this material shared out of convenience—held firm against the wind’s worst efforts. Written on it was a single sentence. “At the feet of these twins, find your first checkpoint.”
Short, sweet, and almost completely unhelpful, Dennis thought. He knew from the reports of previous years that finding the checkpoints was often the most difficult part of the assignment. And it wouldn’t have helped if he’d been given coordinates and a map, if he couldn’t get off this damn rock. The squadron had agreed to meet at the peak of Nob Hill, as quickly as possible after being transported into the city, because it was a more or less central location. Already, Dennis was sure, the others would be rushing to the meeting point. But he, their leader for this project, wouldn’t be there.
Well, he thought, forcing himself to his feet and casting his gaze about the rocky outcrop. Things certainly look bad, but I’m not ready to admit defeat quite yet.
* * *
I might as well have walked here, Estresor Fil thought with mild disappointment. She had beamed in at the near end of the Golden Gate Bridge, which was barely a stone’s throw from the Academy itself. She hadn’t been sent far at all, but she had a good distance ahead of her to get to the meeting point. Cutting through Academy grounds would shorten the trip, though of course she couldn’t do that. She was in civilian clothes and carried no Starfleet identification, and stepping onto Academy or Starfleet Command grounds was cause for instant disqualification.
Even the nearest tram station was the Academy stop, so she couldn’t catch a transport there. She started walking, giving the Academy a wide berth, toward the nearest public station. With her short legs, it would take her a good while to get there. But at least the project was under way.
“Hey! Watch it!”
Felicia Mendoza spun around. She had materialized on a busy sidewalk, and a small knot of pedestrians had to part, like a river flowing around a rock, to get around her as she gathered her bearings. One of the men fixed her with an angry glare, as if it had been her fault where she wound up. Not that he’d have any way of knowing it wasn’t, of course.
But she wasn’t sure what her location was. She was in an urban canyon, with towers of steel around her, but there were many places in San Francisco that could be so described. Felicia wasn’t very familiar with the city—she came from El Salvador, and had moved here only to attend the Academy. She had spent one summer interning at Jupiter Station, and knew that distant locale far better than she did this earthly one.
Getting her bearings wouldn’t be an insurmountable problem, she knew. San Francisco was a temporary home to many tourists and out-of-towners, and the city’s heads took great pains to make it a comfortable place to visit. Kiosks located every few blocks showed transit information, complete with maps and schedules. All she had to do was find the nearest one and she’d be on her way to the meeting point. She was anxious to hear where everyone else had landed, and what their first goal was.
So far, this whole thing seemed like a great deal of fun. She didn’t necessarily expect that it would stay that way. But it might. Being an ordinarily optimistic type anyway, she was willing to accept that small chance.
With a smile on her lips and a spring in her step, she started up the block.
Boon’s feet were soaked. He found this extremely annoying, because it meant that someone had entered coordinates wrong, or there had been a transporter malfunction, or the transporter crew was just plain trying to make life difficult for him. The first two scenarios could have resulted in death or horrific injury, so all things considered, finding himself standing up to his ankles in the freezing surf of the Pacific Ocean wasn’t really as bad as it might have been. But he didn’t think it was either of those two problems—great care was always taken with transporter use, and the crew would not have been haphazard about where they sent a cadet on an Academy project.
Which meant that it was intentional. That ticked him off no end. He didn’t know if it was because he was a Coridanian, or if they simply chose random cadets to harass, just because they could, but the motive didn’t matter to him. He tried to remember their names, so he could make life miserable for them once he was a senior officer, but the names wouldn’t come to him.
He waded ashore. The beach was a dozen or so meters of rocky sand, and he trudged across it, water streaming from his legs and a scowl on his brick-red face.
When this is over, he thought, I’m going to have a serious talk with a certain transporter crew.
* * *
Will thought for a moment that a mistake had been made. They were all supposed to be beamed into San Francisco, but he was in a deep forest somewhere. Early sunlight slanted between trunks and leaves, highlighting dust motes and the last traces of morning fog. The air had a rich, fecund aroma he had been used to, in his youth, but had almost forgotten—the tang of pines, the dusky dry smell of summer grass in an arid clime. Tall trees surrounded him and the brush was so thick he couldn’t even see through it. Branches scratching at his hands and tugging at his clothing, he forced his way through the heaviest of it.
A few minutes of working his way out of the tangle brought him to a clearing and an explanation. Thick grass and low shrubs had grown over an old road here, splitting the roadway and hiding it until Will was literally standing on top of it. He looked at the sweep of the road as it curved out of sight, and it brought back half-remembered pictures he’d seen. He was, he believed, deep inside Golden Gate Park, which had been closed to vehicles for more than a century and allowed to grow wild.
He was alone here, so the question of whether they would all beam in together had been answered. Picking a meeting place had been the simplest precaution, but he was glad they had made the effort. A good portion of this first day might be spent by the squadron members trying to find their way to the Nob Hill location. And for all he knew, others might be even farther away than he was, or in more remote locations. Nob Hill would be a good hike, for him, but not too difficult.
He noted the position of the morning sun, and then started east, toward it, following the broken, overgrown road away from the ocean and into the city.
Chapter 6
Another failure. That Riker has more lives than a damned Antillean feenetchluk.
And how many is that? How much longer do we have to play this game?
The feenetchluk has eleven redundant nervous and circulatory systems that reconfigure themselves in the event of serious injury. You think you’ve killed one but it just shuts down for a few moments, and then comes back at you, scared and angry but not dead. Hence the saying.
Maybe it is just dumb luck, though. Maybe he should be playing dabo someplace, since he seems to survive every attack we throw at him, not by effort of will or any particular ability, but through simple twists of fortune.
Or by simply refusing to concede.
Perhaps. Luck or lives, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he’s scared now. Fearing for his life, his safety, his career. That means he’s off balance, and therefore right where we want him. He’ll start making mistakes. We can keep this up indefinitely, playing him, making him suffer.
As we have suffered.
Exactly. In the end, that’s better than killing him right away. His suffering is so delicious, so…right. And we know that he can’t run from us. He can’t hide, not for long. No matter where he goes, we will have our pleasure.
Yes…that’s the perfect word to describe it. Our pleasure is Riker’s pain, and his death our ultimate release.
San Francisco’s civilian spaceport, at the edge of the bay, never slept. All day and all night transport vehicles from all across the planet rumbled into t
he port, laden with goods destined for distant planets, and those same vehicles, equally burdened, left with imported goods for markets on Earth. Lights burned through the dark of night, engines roared, the voices of working men and women mixed with the clatter and whine of the servos and gears of robotic helpers. Cargo and tourists alike left from this port, ferried to orbital platforms from which the big ships, the deep spacefaring craft, would launch.
Kyle made his way here by a roundabout path, taking underground transport part of the distance, then getting off and walking for a while, then catching an air tram for another segment. If anyone’s gaze fell on him for more than a few moments he changed course or mode of travel. A few times, he thought Tholians had spotted him, but he managed to both avoid them and convince himself that he was merely seeing things, that there were no Tholians trying to kill him, here on Earth. Although plenty of humans were doing their best to make up for that shortage, it seemed.
Finally, as the eastern sky turned from slate gray to pale blue, he approached the great port, thrilling a little as he always did to the rhythmic bustle of enterprise and the stirring adventure of people traveling to the farthest reaches of the universe. He loved his home planet, but his work had taken him off it enough times that he was comfortable in space or on good old terra firma, and the idea of travel always held the promise of the new and unexpected.
This time, though, he wasn’t traveling for fun or business, but for survival. Since it seemed certain that whoever was after him—for whatever reason he couldn’t fathom—had access to Starfleet technology and personnel, then no place in San Francisco was safe for him. With Starfleet headquartered here, its influence was everywhere. For that matter, there were precious few places on Earth where he’d be beyond their grasp. Alaska beckoned, since that state still contained untamed places where a man might hide. But that would probably be the first place they’d look for him once they realized he’d slipped their noose here, and he might not even make it to the back country before they found him again.
You’ve become paranoid, he told himself. Convinced that you’re the focal point of a massive Starfleet conspiracy. It’s crazy.
But crazy or not, it seemed that the evidence pointed toward the truth of his fears. Maybe the conspiracy wasn’t as far-reaching as he thought. Its size didn’t matter—he would be equally dead if there were one person after him or a thousand, if they were allowed to catch him. And his fears were paranoia only to a point—perhaps there weren’t Tholians tracking him through the city’s streets, but the attempts on his life were continuing. Surrendering to Starfleet authority would be, he had to believe, tantamount to suicide.
No, if he was going to stay safe long enough to figure out who was trying to kill him, he would have to be off the planet. He was certain of that. His only safety lay in a combination of distance and anonymity, neither of which could be long achieved Earthside. The rankest beginner to military strategy learned that you had to know the strength of your enemy. An ounce of intelligence was worth a pound of lead, to use the archaic analogy of tacticians of old. Starfleet, Kyle knew, was plenty strong, but he wasn’t yet convinced that it was all of Starfleet after him. Just some of it, person or persons unknown. Until he could reason out who was his enemy, and why, though, he had to assume that all Starfleet personnel were dangerous.
Even at the civilian spaceport there were Starfleet officers to avoid, he discovered. New recruits came through here, as did Starfleet personnel traveling on personal business, or vacation. Starfleet inspectors examined cargo and kept track of the coming and going of ships, alongside the civilian authorities. It seemed that everywhere Kyle looked, he saw uniforms. Dodging them all was patently impossible, so Kyle inserted himself into the middle of a large group of tourists, laughing and joking among themselves, headed for an outbound shuttle. Hidden in the center of the group, he made his way past a small cluster of Security officers. Once he was beyond them and through the doors of the vast passenger terminal, he slipped away from the jovial crowd and headed quickly down a side corridor, where the people weren’t so well dressed or so loud. Here, even the lights seemed dimmer, and the sound of his own footsteps echoed in the emptier space. Freight deals were made down this hallway, cargo consigned, but those were usually deals done quietly, between the interested parties. No crowds of spacefaring tourists came down this way, and Kyle felt exposed as he wandered, trying to move with purpose even though he didn’t know precisely where he was going.
Down this side hall there were several offices, mostly just glorified counters over which deals were made, some decorated with holoimages of ships in flight or extraterrestrial landscapes. Humans staffed some of these offices, but not all. At this hour, most negotiations had long since been done, and the real action was out at the loading docks, so humans and aliens alike sat on stools or chairs, staring at the walls and waiting for shift changes. With no particular knowledge or experience to draw from, Kyle picked one more or less at random. It was a company he had never heard of, which was exactly the kind he had been looking for. The sign on the wall above the counter said INTAGLIO SHIPPING AND FREIGHT, and the man leaning on the counter looked as if he was giving up on the struggle to stay awake. His skin was a prunelike color, so dark it could have been brown or a deep purple, his hair a startlingly canary yellow against that skin, and his eyes were small and hooded. Kyle suspected he was part human and part something else that he couldn’t even guess at.
“Help you?” the man asked sleepily. He barely glanced at Kyle.
“I need to take a trip,” Kyle told him.
“We’re a freight mover, not a travel agency.”
“I’m not looking for scenery,” Kyle said flatly. “Or companionship. Just distance.”
The man straightened now, taking his elbow off the counter. “That a fact?”
“That’s right. In fact, the fewer fellow passengers the better. Surely you’ve got a berth on something, going somewhere.”
“Well,” the man said with a yellow-toothed smile, “if you’re going to be picky…”
“I can be demanding,” Kyle said. “I demand discretion and privacy. But those are my only nonnegotiable needs. Beyond that, you’ll find I’m very flexible.”
The man hummed a couple of times, looking Kyle up and down as if expecting him to metamorphose into something else right before his eyes. All he would see, Kyle knew, was a fit, square-jawed man whose once-dark hair, now mostly well on its way toward gray, was undoubtedly somewhat mussed from the night’s activity, dressed in a civilian jumpsuit, who hadn’t had nearly enough sleep in the past couple of nights. Finally, apparently satisfied with his examination, the man clasped his hands together. “I happen to know a ship’s captain,” he said, “for whom discretion is practically a religion. This same captain is about to embark on a long voyage, and might, I suppose, have some space on her ship for an unexpected passenger. But this particular captain, I’m afraid, has a bit of a gambling problem. She is well recompensed for her labors, but somehow can always seem to use a few more credits than she has.”
Kyle had expected nothing less. “I can pay,” he declared. In fact, this was what he had hoped for. The Federation had largely evolved beyond such things as greed and bribery. The fact that this ship’s captain was amenable to both implied that she was outside the Federation mainstream, maybe not from a member world at all.
The man’s smile broadened at Kyle’s willingness. “Then we should talk further,” he said. “By all means.”
Chapter 7
For a moment, Will thought he was the first one to reach the rendezvous point at the corners of Sacramento and Jones. This city, like Paris and Vienna and New York, had been laid out with an efficiency and a consideration of the landscape that had made their plans virtually unchanging over the centuries. While the buildings themselves sometimes came down and new ones went up, the basic grids of the streets had been the same since the days when horse-drawn carriages were the only vehicular traffic. These days, t
he traffic on the streets was virtually all pedestrian, with only the rarest vehicles passing by.
From this intersection, Will could look down the hill in four directions and see for what seemed like kilometers in each one, could see the rising and falling of the city’s many hills, the homes and businesses crowding the streets, tall skyscrapers claiming extra height by virtue of being built on the crests. A gentle breeze from the west seemed to carry the scent of the sea to him, though he thought that was probably an illusion. More likely there was a seafood restaurant down the block preparing some lunchtime fare.
After standing there for a few minutes, turning to admire the view and also search for his squadron-mates, he realized that Estresor Fil watched him from a shadowed doorway alcove, a serious expression on her small green face. Since she didn’t seem interested in coming to meet him, he went to her.
“Been waiting long?” he asked when he reached her position.
“Twenty-eight minutes, eleven seconds,” she replied. She hadn’t had to consult a timepiece of any kind to know that.
He gestured at the doorway. “Are you, ahh, hiding from someone?”
“This is supposed to be a survival exercise,” she explained. “We’ve been instructed to remain unobtrusive. Standing out there gawking hardly seems unobtrusive to me.”
Will shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “It seems a little more natural than hiding in a doorway. Don’t you think it’s a pretty great view?”
“I hadn’t given it any thought at all,” she told him. “It’s a view. I don’t see how one would judge any given view as greater or lesser than any other.”
“Unless it was a view from which you could see what’s-his-name, that sailor. Popeye, or something, right?”
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