Deny Thy Father

by Jeff Mariotte

  Will turned to see Marden Zaffos looking intently at him. The security guard, a couple of years older than Will, had a thick mass of dark curly hair, and around his eyes there were dark smudged rings that reminded Will of a raccoon.

  “No problem,” Will replied. “I don’t know if you heard, but Luwadis was able to quell the riot before too many were hurt. The mob is probably still mad at him for calling us in, but my impression is they’re even madder at us.”

  Marden nodded, his hands folded across his chest. “Can’t really blame them,” he said. “But I know I should never have gone out onto that balcony. That was a stupid mistake. I just wanted to see…to get a glimpse of Candelar.”

  “We all make mistakes,” Will said, biting back another yawn.

  “Some are worse than others.” Marden eyed the ceiling for a moment, and cleared his throat. “Can I talk to you, Will? Someplace more private?”

  Will hoped this wouldn’t take long. He could almost hear his bed calling to him. “Sure,” he agreed, not wanting to turn away a fellow crew member, and potential friend, who clearly had something important on his mind. “I’m just around the corner, if that’s okay.”

  “That would be great,” Marden said. “If you have something else you need to do, we could talk another time…”

  “No, now’s fine,” Will said. “I don’t have any plans except for sleeping.” He led the way to his quarters and opened the door. Marden followed him in. Once inside, Will lowered the bed and sat on it, his back up against the bulkhead. He offered Marden the desk chair.

  “I should never have gone on that mission,” Marden said. “My mother’s father was from Handihar.”

  “In the Candelar system,” Will observed.

  “That’s right. Her mother, my grandmother, was human, and my father’s family is all human. So I just have that little bit of Handiharian in me. But my grandfather always told me these great stories about his homeworld, when I was a boy. I never thought I’d see the place. Candelar IV isn’t exactly the same thing, but I figured it was the closest I’d ever get, and I just couldn’t resist taking a look. I didn’t think it would be a problem, but I guess I wasn’t really thinking it through. I put us all in danger, and I’m sorry.”

  “We were never really in danger,” Will pointed out. “We always had the option of beaming out before there was trouble.”

  “That’s true,” Marden agreed. “But still—it was a stupid thing to do.”

  “I won’t argue with that.”

  “But at the same time,” Marden went on, “I couldn’t help sympathizing with them.”

  “With the mob?” Will asked, slightly surprised. “They wanted to lynch Plure.”

  Marden nodded. “And Handihar is one of the worlds he plundered,” he reminded Will. “A hundred thousand dead, there, more or less. Basically so he could extort a payment from them to make him go away. And the payment has almost utterly destroyed their economy. Handihar is a backward place, Will. Tribal, low-tech. Not wealthy. And not able to stand up to a heavily armed madman like Endyk Plure on their own.”

  “Well, he’s in Starfleet hands now. A Federation trial will be fair, and he’ll be appropriately dealt with when it’s over.”

  “Luwadis was right about that,” Marden argued. “There’s no fair way to deal with such a person. The best he should be able to hope for is a slow, agonizing death.”

  “I understand how you feel, Marden,” Will assured him.

  “I don’t think you do, Will. Those were my people. Distantly related, but still. Endyk Plure has to die for what he did, and I’m afraid that Federation justice won’t do the job.”

  “So what do you propose?” Will asked. He wasn’t at all sure what Marden was driving at.

  “I’ve got full access to the brig,” Marden said. “And I know the shift schedule. I can take care of it tonight, before we reach the transfer point.”

  “No!” Will was shocked that Marden would even suggest something like that. “Marden, you can’t. You’re Starfleet. We have rules. Principles. You can’t just abandon those.”

  “Yes, we have principles,” Marden said, leaning forward in the chair now. “But don’t you agree that some principles outweigh others? The idea that Endyk Plure’s life might be spared, in spite of all the deaths he’s caused—I just can’t take that. It’s repugnant to me.”

  “But to take it all into your own hands…how is that better?”

  “It’s better because I would be killing one man, the killer of thousands. It’s just simple math, Will. One for many.”

  “It’s more than math,” Will countered. “It’s what’s right and wrong. You can’t just decide for yourself that he’s guilty and decide his punishment.”

  Marden stood up and paced around Will’s small room. “His punishment seems obvious to me. How could it be otherwise? Someone who is responsible for so many deaths…”

  “I’m just saying, there’s a system to determine that. When you put on the uniform of Starfleet, you agreed to enforce that system.”

  “But, Will…he…” Marden looked down at Will, still sitting back on his own bed, and his face was full of anguish. Will felt bad for the man, but not so bad that he could agree with his plan. As tired as he was, he realized that if he could just keep Marden here, talking, maybe they’d get to the point where they were to transfer Endyk Plure to another vessel before Marden could throw away his own career. He could almost kick himself for the inspiration, but he felt he had to try.

  “Tell me about Handihar, Marden. What did your grandfather tell you about it?”

  Marden smiled for the first time, a little wistfully, as if remembering pleasant times with his grandfather. He drifted back over to the chair and sat down again. “Like I said, it’s mostly a tribal society,” he began. “Close to the land. It’s a big planet, huge, I guess, according to him, and his part of it is densely forested. Junglelike. They live in wooden structures, not much more than huts, I think. The air is so humid that the buildings have to be replaced on a pretty regular basis. My grandfather left there when he was a young man, but from what he has told me it’s still mostly that way.”

  “Sounds pleasant,” Will said, just to keep Marden talking.

  “I’ve always wanted to visit,” Marden told him, smiling a little as he thought about it. “He makes it sound kind of like paradise. But…there’s one story he told me, Will. I think maybe it especially applies, in this case.”

  Will had just wanted him to reminisce about the planet, trying to keep him away from the subject of Endyk Plure. But he guessed that sitting here talking was still better than seeking the guy out in the brig and killing him. “What story?” he asked.

  Marden took a deep breath. Apparently it’s going to be a long one, Will thought. He hoped he could stay awake for it.

  “Have you ever heard of a gralipha?” Marden asked by way of beginning.

  Will racked his brain but couldn’t recall that he had.

  “It’s a huge, wild beast,” Marden explained. “Many legged, and with a massive, heavy skull, horned on the top. Almost like some kind of Earth dinosaur, I think. Anyway, this story that my father’s family passed down, for generations, was about the time a gralipha attacked his family’s village. Just came in out of the jungle and ran around in a blind rage, berserk, smashing huts, killing with abandon. The people were taken by surprise—they lived with graliphas in the jungle all the time, but none had ever charged the village like this. They couldn’t do much to fight back—it was all they could do to try to stay out of its way. It cut a swath through the village and then left, back into the jungle it had come from.”

  “Sounds kind of like those stories of rogue elephants,” Will suggested. “How they’d sometimes attack Indian villages.”

  Marden nodded. “Very much like that. Except this thing was at least twice the size of any elephant. Or, that’s how my grandfather tells the story, anyway.”

  “What did they do? The villagers.”

>   “They picked up after the attack. They buried their dead, they tended to the wounded, they rebuilt their homes and fortified the log wall around the village. Then they went into their culturally prescribed mourning period. For days, they mourned the dead, weeping and laying offerings at their graves. This was, grandfather said, how his people honored their dead.

  “What they didn’t do was go after the gralipha. And six days later, it came back. It tore through the brand new fence like it was paper, and ran amuck again. More homes fell, more people died. Children and the elderly and those hurt in the first attack, especially, because they couldn’t dodge it in time.”

  “That’s terrible,” Will said.

  “It was. My grandfather can barely hold back the tears when he tells the story. Some of his ancestors—mine too, I guess—died in these attacks.

  “But this time, the villagers reacted differently. They left the rebuilding and the mourning for later. They organized into hunting parties and they followed the path the beast made when it left the village. They tracked it. When they caught up to it, there was a terrible battle. More lives were lost. The thing swung its head and its horns gouged and tore at the villagers. Their weapons were just primitive spears and arrows and slings—they could barely penetrate its tough hide.

  “They didn’t give up, though. They continued the fight. Eventually, their weapons found tender spots—the eyes, the roof of the mouth, the base of the neck. They brought the mad gralipha down, and they killed it, even though the cost was high. Because this was the only way they could guarantee that it would not return to their village later.”

  Will understood. He shifted his position, sitting cross-legged on the bed with his spine straight. “So Endyk Plure is your gralipha,” he said.

  Marden nodded. “He’s rampaged through the village once too often. If he’s not stopped at the first opportunity—that means now, tonight—there’s still the chance that he’ll escape and come back. His forces might be closing in on the Pegasus even now. The authorities on Candelar IV said they wanted the Federation to take him so he’d get a fair trial, and so the mobs wouldn’t storm the prison, but I’m convinced that they were just as worried about Plure’s troops coming to his rescue.”

  “You could be right,” Will admitted. “Although I doubt that Plure’s forces would want to risk an attack on Starfleet. Against the Candelar system—and I don’t mean to be dismissive, just realistic—they were tough guys. But that’s a pretty backward system. Against Starfleet, they’d be school-yard bullies facing down real adults with real firepower. They wouldn’t have a chance. And the thing about bullies is, they only like to fight the weak. They usually leave the strong well enough alone.”

  “Possibly,” Marden said. “But even if they don’t come for him, I won’t be convinced that he’ll never escape until I see him dead with my own eyes. And it wasn’t just ancient ancestors that he killed on Handihar, but family. My grandfather’s two sisters, and their entire families. There are just too many reasons for him to die, and none that I can see to let him live.”

  “Except your career, and the oath you swore to uphold Federation law,” Will pointed out.

  “That’s one argument, Will,” Marden said. “I’m just not sure it’s a good enough argument.”

  Will had felt something nagging at him while Marden told his story, and now he remembered what it was. A story of his own, from his younger days, that might also be applicable. He closed his eyes for a minute, knowing that to do so was to risk falling right to sleep, but wanting to get the story straight in his mind before he started telling it. And when he did, it all came rushing back to him, as clear as if it had been yesterday.

  It had been his fourteenth summer, he recalled. Valdez, still a small town, sat at the edge of one of the greatest wilderness areas in North America, but even so, he was beginning to feel constricted, limited, and impatient to see more of the world. But halfway through the summer, there was an event that promised diversion, and he welcomed it.

  A campsite in the nearby wilderness had been attacked by a grizzly—a rogue, one of the campers said, enormous and vicious. The bear had torn though the tents, upending food lockers, and maiming one of the campers. The remaining campers—there had been, Will recalled, eight in all—had survived, and determined that someone needed to kill the bear before someone else was hurt. Some of the local people in Valdez volunteered to find the animal, agreeing that a rogue grizzly could be bad for their community and needed to be put down.

  Will’s father was one of the volunteers. Will insisted that he should be allowed to go along. His father argued, but not very energetically, and he changed his mind more easily than Will had even anticipated. So they each got a phaser rifle and they joined the hunting party leaving from the campground early on the morning after the attack.

  As they walked through the forests and meadows of the wilderness area, weapons at the ready, alert for any signs of the bear, Kyle Riker was more talkative than usual. “This is nice,” he had said. “I mean, not the idea that we have to kill a grizzly before it kills one of us. But being out here in the sunshine and the trees, with a blue sky over our heads, a father and son together…we don’t do this sort of thing often enough, Will. We never have. My fault, I guess, and I’m sorry.”

  He had stopped in the middle of the trail then, and laid a hand softly on Will’s shoulder—the kind of physical contact that was rare between this father and son. “I’m sorry for a lot of things,” he had said. “More than you can imagine. I hope one day you’ll understand why I’ve done things the way I have. I hope I’ve made some good choices, even when they haven’t seemed like it. A day like this, being out here with you—Will, you’re a man, look at you! I’m sure there are still things you need to learn, but I’m not so sure that I can teach them.”

  He had gone quiet then, more like the father that Will was used to, the one who kept his feelings bottled up inside as if they were poison, and they had continued tracking the bear. When they’d lost the trail for a while, Will had found it by scouting in ever-wider circles until he cut across it, and Kyle had clapped him on the back. “You’ll be fine, Will. You’ll be just fine,” he had said. Will hadn’t realized then—hadn’t realized until just this moment, sitting in his quarters on the starship Pegasus with Marden Zaffos, what Kyle had meant by that. He had known then that he was going to leave, going to abandon Will to his fate. The way Will handled a gun, the way he cut bear track—those were pretty meaningless skills, in the greater scheme of things, but somehow Kyle Riker had decided that they meant Will was mature enough to make his own way in the world.

  They had, later that day, found the bear. She had a den, and when the hunting party approached she had growled ferociously and lunged at them. But several of the hunters fired at once, and the bear fell without any human casualties.

  Inside the den, though, they found something that cast a different light on things. There were three cubs inside the den—dead cubs, bearing wounds that could only have been made with phasers. None of the campers had claimed to be hunters, and indeed none of them had joined this hunt. But they’d been the only ones out in this area that any of the townspeople knew about.

  The hunting party returned to the campground and ransacked the tents until they found the hidden phaser rifles. The campers protested, denied, and then finally, faced with the evidence, admitted their guilt. They had tracked the bear for sport, finding her den and killing her cubs just because they could. It hadn’t occurred to them that the animals were an endangered species, that they had done something stupid and shameful, until it was too late. And when the bear came to their campsite, she was only seeking revenge for her loss.

  Will told Marden the story in as much detail as he could remember, and when it was over Marden looked puzzled.

  “Are you saying revenge is never legitimate?” he asked.

  “Not at all, Marden. I’m just saying it’s something you have to be careful with. It’s more complicated than
it looks, sometimes. If you kill Plure, are you the hunters? Or are you the bear?”

  Marden shook his head. “Will, that story doesn’t even make any sense.”

  “Who said life has to make sense?” Will shot back. “It’s just something that happened. Whatever you want to take away from it is up to you.”

  “Well, what do you get from it?”

  Will considered for a moment. “Something really unexpected,” he said. He described what his father had said, and what he now thought it meant. “It was my father’s good-bye speech,” he said. “It wasn’t much of one, but it was the best one he could bring himself to give.”

  The hours passed as Will and Marden talked. Will battled sleep, and eventually reached a point beyond tiredness, where he became more alert, and might not have been able to sleep if he’d tried. Later, they’d made some coffee and sat in silence, drinking it. Finally, Marden looked at the time.

  “We’re there,” he said. “Unless the schedule has been thrown way off for some reason. Plure is being beamed to the starship that’ll take him back to Earth for his trial, or he will be soon.”

  “Probably so,” Will agreed.

  “I know what this was all about, Will. I know you just wanted to keep me talking so that I wouldn’t get my shot at Plure. I wanted my revenge, and you kept it from me.”

  “I can’t apologize for that, Marden,” Will said. He felt different, somehow, after the long night and the unexpected revelations. Maybe it was just lack of sleep, but maybe it was something more. Maybe it had to do with a new kind of maturity making itself felt. He hoped that was it, in fact—he had wondered if he’d ever grow up, and now it seemed that he might after all.

  “You don’t need to. I appreciate it. I’m mad as all hell—but I appreciate it anyway. You stopped me from making a fool of myself, from throwing away my career and maybe my life. More than that, though, you corrected my course even when I couldn’t. I’m not a vengeful person, I’m not a judge and a jury, and I’m damn sure no executioner. If I had let myself become those things, it would have been a terrible mistake.”