“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Dennis said. “Starfleet doesn’t just talk about integrity; they personify it.”
“They’re right, Boon,” Will said. “If you don’t think so, you don’t know much about Starfleet’s history.”
Boon shook his head, scoffing at the others. “Some people are so naïve,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, when I’m sitting in that captain’s chair, I hope I don’t have any dreamers like you all on my crew to worry about.”
“With an attitude like that,” Will replied, “I don’t think you’ll ever have to worry about being in the captain’s chair at all.” He was surprised that this side of Boon had never emerged before. But then, he hadn’t know the Coridanian that long, just during this school year. And none of their group projects had forced them to spend as much time together as this one would. Any personality conflicts that were simmering beneath the surface would surely come out during the week’s forced intimacy.
Boon leaned forward threateningly and Will braced himself, believing that the Coridanian was going to attack him instead of Felicia. Boon had height and reach on him, Will knew, and if it was going to be a fight it would be a brutal one that he would either win quickly or not at all.
Before either male could surrender to the testosterone that fueled them, however, Estresor Fil inserted her tiny form between them. “I need to eat,” she implored. “Now.”
Will held Boon’s yellow eyes for a few more seconds, then ticked his head toward the diminutive Zimonian. “She’s right,” he said. “We need to get her fed—all of us, really—and we need to stick together. You willing to do that?”
Boon breathed heavily, but Will could see his body relax, his fists unclench. “Yeah, okay,” he said, sounding a bit reluctant to call off the fight. Will had the sense that their reckoning was merely postponed, not canceled.
With the tension dissipated, though not eliminated, they turned once again to the question of food. Finding some was not difficult—no one went hungry in San Francisco—and they ate at an outdoor table. Boon and Will sat at opposite ends, but the group kept the conversation away from the recent incident between them. Dennis steered it back toward the question of lodging for the night.
“If we’re going to avoid public shelters,” he said, with a furtive glance toward Boon, “then we’re going to have to come up with some alternative. I don’t want to spend the night on the streets, and we can’t go back to our rooms at the Academy.”
“Let’s approach it as if we really were on a mission,” Will suggested. “We’d want to stay someplace discreet, where the local authorities wouldn’t notice us. We wouldn’t want to interact much with the locals, if we could help it, until we had the lay of the land better. Since we spent most of today trying to meet up and then climbing mountains, we didn’t really get to do that.”
“I know a place,” Felicia offered.
“Where?” Dennis asked her. “I hope it doesn’t involve any more climbing.”
“Remember that doorway that Estresor Fil found this morning? No one went in or out. The windows were all blacked over. I think it’s an empty space, and obviously it’s not getting much use, if any.”
“You want to break in?” Dennis asked, surprised.
“Exactly. We don’t have to hurt anything. We just go in, sleep, and leave in the morning.”
“That’s illegal,” Estresor Fil pointed out.
“So?” Boon asked, the first word he’d said since he and Will had faced off on the street. “Like she said, we wouldn’t hurt anything. If we were on an away mission in hostile territory, we wouldn’t hesitate to break a few minor laws to save our own skins.”
“I suppose,” Estresor Fil said, more loquacious now that her stomach was full. “Although I don’t feel very comfortable with the idea. Weren’t we specifically forbidden from breaking laws?”
“There are laws and there are laws,” Boon argued. “In San Francisco, anyone who doesn’t have a place to sleep is entitled to go to one of the public shelters. That’s why they have them. But if we don’t want to do that—and if we were on a secret mission here, that would be the last place we’d want to show up—then we have to bunk someplace else. We don’t want to stay in a tourist hotel, again since we’re supposed to be here secretly. Either we make friends with one of the locals, in a hurry, or we go with Felicia’s idea.”
“We don’t seem to have a lot of options,” Will agreed. “And it does seem like if you’re trying to hide from the authorities, going to a shelter run by those same authorities is a bad idea.”
“It’s hard to argue with that,” Dennis admitted. “I still don’t think I like the idea, but—”
“You got any better ones?” Boon interrupted.
“That’s precisely the problem,” Estresor Fil put in, having apparently been won over. “Either we don’t break any of Admiral Paris’s rules but we do the single thing that would most likely result in our capture, or we break rules judiciously and carry out our assignment.”
When she finished, all eyes went to Dennis.
“I don’t like it,” he said at last. “But since I can’t, in fact, think of anything better, I agree that it seems like the best of our limited options.”
By the time they’d finished their dinner, the sky had gone dark.
They caught an underground transport back to Nob Hill, checking the route maps to see if there were any obvious clues to an artist who spanned the globe. There weren’t, so they continued back to the corner at which they’d met earlier that day, and with which Will and Estresor Fil had become so familiar. At the doorway alcove, Boon took the lead in the breaking-and-entering process. He said he’d done it several times, at home on the hardrock mining planet of Coridan.
“Security might be a little better here,” Dennis suggested in a nervous whisper.
“Are you calling Coridan some kind of primitive backwater?” Boon demanded.
“No, not at all,” Dennis said quickly, backing away a step as if Boon’s words had carried physical force.
“Look, Boon,” Will said, stepping up and forgetting his earlier resolve. “I don’t know if your problem is that we elected Dennis to lead the squadron on this mission, or what. But you’re acting like someone with a chip on his shoulder the size of the moon. If you can’t leave your personal feelings behind and carry on with the mission, then you should just tell us now so we can report back to Admiral Paris that we failed.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Riker?” Boon asked with a snarl. “You sabotage everything you ever do, guaranteeing you’ll never succeed at anything so you won’t really be tested. You’d just love to shoot a hole in this project right off the bat.”
The accusation stunned Will. He had never thought of himself as self-destructive, and he doubted that Boon knew him better than he knew himself. But at the same time, he knew that sometimes others saw unpleasant traits in people that they couldn’t see in themselves. He decided to shelve any further examination of the issue, to consider later. Right now, they had a building to break into.
“Never mind my psychological shortcomings, Counselor,” he shot back. “Can you open that door or not?”
Boon had already turned away from the others and had the faceplate removed from the keypad. “Yeah, just give me a few minutes to reprogram this,” he said. Will tried to watch but Boon blocked his view with his broad shoulders and quickly moving hands. “This one’s easy. I’ve seen some with multiple redundant alarm systems, but this—well, I guess there’s nothing in here worth taking.”
“That’s okay,” Felicia said, sounding maybe a little nervous that she’d suggested this in the first place. “We’re not taking anything. Is there a lot of crime on Coridan?”
“A fair bit,” Boon said. He closed the faceplate and put his palm against the keypad, and the door irised open for him. “All that dilithium, you know, and other valuable minerals. Left us wide open for all sorts of folks to come around and take whatever they could get their hands on.” He stepped to the side and bowed toward the doorway, indicating that the others should enter first. As he did so, he looked right at Felicia. “Of course, if I read you right, you were asking if Icommitted a lot of crime on Coridan. Which, of course, is impossible—I wouldn’t have been accepted into the Academy if I’d had a criminal record, now, would I?”