“You do that,” Kyle agreed. “Keep them close, always.” He fingered the uniform’s collar. “I’ll, uhh ... send this back to you.”

“Take your time.”

Ben put out his hand and Kyle took it in both of his. “Thank you, Ben. You made the right call.”

“Curzon’s a pretty good judge of character, Mr. Riker,” Ben replied. “I already knew that.”

He turned on his heel and went back inside. Kyle was alone, with who knew how many enemies around him.

Very much alone,he thought.

They came for him on the air tram. This time of night, the car was empty except for him, and there were only a couple of other passengers on the transport at all. He wasn’t sure where he would go; he just wanted to put some distance between himself and Starfleet Command. He closed his eyes, willing his body to relax after the tension back at the infirmary. But after riding for about twenty minutes, he heard it—the familiar hiss of breathing apparatus that allowed them to function in an M-Class atmosphere. He snapped to attention and saw three of them boarding his car, their suits disguising superheated crystalline bodies, multicolored masks hiding their hideous faces. They pointed long, crooked sticks at him and he knew they were about to fire.

Panicked, he dove from his seat, hitting the floor and rolling beneath a seat farther down the aisle and hunched there, breathing heavily, waiting for the worst. The red rays he expected didn’t come, though. After a few moments, he dared to open his eyes. Two elderly civilians, both human, both somewhat astonished, stared at him with concern etching their features. “Are you okay, son?” one of them asked. Both of them kept their distance, Kyle noted, as if afraid to come too close.

“I don’t ... the Tholians ...” Kyle was dumfounded.

“Haven’t seen any Tholians around here,” the other one said with a chuckle. “I think we’d notice if there were any.”

“I expect so,” Kyle agreed. Humiliated, he crawled out from under the seat. Not that it would have provided him with any protection, he thought, studying it so he didn’t have to look at the people who assumed he’d gone completely insane. Not against those weapons they carried. He remembered those weapons, and the fierce damage they could do, entirely too well.

Realizing that he was still badly dressed in Ben Sisko’s uniform, he jumped off the transport at the next station rather than let the old couple get a longer look at him. He wasn’t sure where he was, but that was for the best. They’re starting again,he knew. The flashbacks.

He needed medical attention, or psychiatric help. But they were looking for him at the infirmary. Starfleet Command wasn’t a safe place for him now. No place was safe, really—at least, no place that Starfleet controlled, or where they had operatives. As he exited the station on a stair-lift to the street, he felt a stab of fear. What might be waiting on the street? A Starfleet assassin? A force of Tholian warriors? Something else, equally deadly, that he didn’t even know to watch for?

When he reached the street, which was dark and empty, he realized he was still carrying his padd, and it suddenly occurred to him that each padd had global positioning technology built in. A user could immediately locate his own coordinates via satellite. But conversely, that meant that someone else—someone at Starfleet, for instance, with access to the satellite, could locate the user. The mouth of an alley gaped ahead, and Kyle turned down it, looked all around to be sure he wasn’t observed, and then raised his padd, intending to hurl it full force into a blank brick wall.

He stopped his arm at the peak of his motion, though, when a different idea dawned on him. Instead of throwing the thing he sat down in the alley, back against one of the high walls, and spent a few minutes reprogramming it. When he was finished, instead of accurately signaling its position, it would send signals to satellites chosen at random, in orbit all around the world. Anyone who tried to track it would find themselves hopelessly confused. Satisfied then that his padd would no longer give away his location, he tucked it into a pocket and hurried away from the alley.

As he walked quickly through the city’s nighttime streets, Kyle hoped that whoever was looking for him developed a massive migraine from trying to use his own padd against him. Once he had figured out who was after him, and why, he hoped to give them a much worse headache.

At the very least.

Chapter 5

A sharp knock at Will’s door woke him from a sound sleep. He glanced at the chron near his bed. Four-forty in the morning. Who ... ?

“Yes?” he called, hoping his animosity was clear in his voice.

“Will Riker?”

“That’s right.” He spoke these words defiantly. Anyone who would be rude enough to come around at this hour—especially today, of all days, when he was about to embark on his final project for Admiral Paris’s survival class—was going to be told off, Riker style. “Who’s there?”

“Starfleet security, cadet. Please open the door.”

“Come in,” Riker called, the vocal command unlocking the door. Two gold-shirted officers pulled down the old-fashioned handle to open the door and enter. One of them looked at Will, his hand resting on the butt of his phaser pistol, while the other glanced about the room. “Looking for something?” Will asked, sitting up on the edge of his bed.

“We’re looking for your father, Cadet. Mr. Kyle Riker. Have you seen him recently?”

Will couldn’t restrain the laugh. “That depends. What’s recent to you?” he asked. “Five years?”

The security officer looked surprised. “He’s your father. He works here at Starfleet Headquarters.”

“And your point is ... ?”

The second security officer, the one giving Will’s small quarters the once over, seemed satisfied by his search. “He’s not here.”

“I told you that,” Will said. “He’s never been here.”

“Have you heard from him? Tonight?”

Will shook his head vigorously. “You don’t seem to get the point,” he said. “We don’t talk. At all.”

“So you’d have no idea where he is right now?”

Will glanced at the chron, as if for emphasis. “Since he’s not crazy, as far as I know, I would guess he’s home in bed. Wherever that is.”

“He’s not there,” the security man said.

“Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“Do you know where he might go? Any favorite places, anyone he’d turn to in an emergency?”

These guys just don’t have a clue,Will thought. And they’re supposed to be providing security?“I have no idea,” he said. “Listen to me—Kyle Riker and I haven’t seen or spoken to each other in five years. I don’t know who his friends are, I don’t know where he spends his time. I just don’t know. The last time I saw him was in Alaska, if that helps.”

The second security officer touched the first one on the arm. “Come on, he’s got nothing.”

The first one paused, as if unwilling to admit defeat, but then he gave a little shrug and turned away. “If you hear from him, contact security immediately,” he called over his shoulder as they left the room.

Yeah,Will thought. Because that’s likely to happen.

He looked at his bunk again, and he looked at the time. Almost o-five hundred. They were to report to the Academy’s transporter room by six-thirty. Other squadrons were being transported into the city at different times during the morning. It was foolish to think he’d get back to sleep now, and even if he did he’d have to get up soon anyway. Instead of trying, he went into his bathroom for a hot shower. It might, he knew, be his last for a while.

At the appointed hour—stifling a yawn, his eyes burning from lack of sleep—Will met his squadron mates in the transporter room. Estresor Fil looked excited, for her: her eyes open wide and sparkling with some inner light, her lips parted in something that looked like a smile-in-training. Boon lounged against an operator console, apparently as barely awake as Will himself, although with Boon that was more or less his natural state. Felicia and Dennis chatted happily between themselves, in low tones.