“I will,” Kyle assured him. “And thanks.”
His own office on the twenty-third floor of the Headquarters skyscraper tower was, Kyle thought, a good deal more “lived-in”-looking than Lieutenant Dugan’s. As he kept books at home, he also had a cabinet full of them here. One wall was entirely covered in old-fashioned paper maps. Some were antiques—a map of the battleground at Antie-tam, from the American Civil War, in which one of his ancestors had distinguished himself, for instance, and a map of San Francisco from the twentieth century. Others were nautical charts of the world’s oceans, and still others two-dimensional printouts of stellar cartography—not especially practical, but he still enjoyed looking at them. He liked being able to see the lines on his maps and visualize himself at a particular point in time and space.
Just now, though, Kyle sat at his desk, chair turned away from it, looking at a shadowbox frame above the bookshelf in which there were some other items with a deeply personal meaning to him: his wife’s wedding ring, the key to the first house they’d lived in, up in Alaska, and a holoimage of her outside that house, holding their baby boy, Will, in her arms. She had been standing in the shadow of a tall fir, but the sun’s rays had fallen on her as if cast there by one of the ancient Dutch masters, picking her and the baby out and limning them clearly against the dark backdrop. Her hair was golden in that light, reminding Kyle of a honey jar in a window with the sun beaming through it, and her smile had been equally radiant.
Less than two years later, Annie was dead, leaving Kyle and young Will on their own.
Kyle turned away, suddenly. That was not why he’d come in here, he knew. He had to figure out why someone would want to kill him, not lose himself in a past that could never be reclaimed.
Starfleet was primarily a scientific, exploratory, and diplomatic agency, not a military one, but there were always conflicts brewing at various points around known space, and therefore always something to which Kyle should be paying attention. Recently, the U.S.S. Stargazerhad found itself in some difficulty in the Maxia Zeta System, for instance. The ship had been nearly destroyed, but her crew had survived, drifting in a shuttlecraft for a few weeks until being rescued. Kyle was trying to draw together all the information he could on the attack in hopes of learning who had done it, and what its captain, one Jean-Luc Picard, might have done differently in its defense.
Could the attack have had something to do with that?Kyle wondered. The Stargazer’sassailants were still unknown, and maybe they preferred to stay that way. Of course, Kyle Riker wasn’t the only person working on that mystery, not by a long shot. He wasn’t even the most high-profile. Why would they come after me?he asked himself. I’m the least of their worries.
Well, not theleast, he mentally amended. He was good at what he did, and if—when—he found out who was behind the attack on the Stargazer,whoever had done it would be sorry they had survived. But even granting that, it still seemed unlikely that Yeoman Hall had been responsible for an attack sofar away, or would have any connection to the mystery attackers.
Still, he noted “Maxia Zeta,” down on his padd, and then turned his mind toward his next priority. But before he could continue, his office door tweedled at him.
“Come in,” he said.
The door opened and two security officers—not Lieutenant Dugan—stood outside. Chief Petty Officer Maxwell Hsu, an aide to Admiral Owen Paris, stepped in, looking more than a little uncomfortable. “Mr. Riker, sir ... the admiral would like to see you,” he said haltingly.
“He normally just calls when he wants to see me. What makes this time different?” Kyle knew his directness would take the aide off guard, which was why he did it.
Maxwell cleared his throat and examined his feet. “I ... I don’t know the answer to that, sir,” he said. “I just know that he asked me—” here he raised his hands slightly, as if to indicate the security officers waiting in the corridor. “—us ... to come and escort you to him.”
Kyle pushed his chair back, pressed his palms flat against the surface of his desk, and rose to his feet. “Well, then,” he said with forced affability, “I guess we’d better find out what he wants.”
They walked briskly through the halls, the security officers a couple of strides behind Kyle at all times, as if they thought he might make a break for it. He didn’t know what it was about, but he knew he didn’t like the feeling. First, that someone had tried to kill him, compounded by the fact that he had actually, albeit in self-defense, killed his assailant. And now this, being escorted through Starfleet Headquarters as if he were little more than a common criminal. It was infuriating.
And not a little terrifying.
Instead of Admiral Paris’s office, they led him to a nearby conference room. Hsu motioned for Kyle to stay put while he poked his head inside. A moment later, he emerged and gestured Kyle in with a halfhearted smile. Kyle walked in, completely at a loss as to what he should expect.
If he’d had hours to think about it, he still would not have expected what he saw.
At the end of a long, oval table polished to a high gloss, Admiral Owen Paris sat rigidly upright, giving him an avuncular, sympathetic smile. To his right, on the table’s side, Vice Admiral Bonner eyed him appraisingly. To Bonner’s right, an assortment of Starfleet brass, human and non-, most known at least in passing to Kyle. Charlie Bender, F’lo’kith Smeth, Teresa Santangelo, and two others Kyle couldn’t put names to.
Admiral Paris half-rose from his chair and swept his arm toward an empty chair, looking very lonely all by itself on the near side of the table. “Come in, Kyle, please,” he said, his voice familiarly gruff. “I’m sorry for all the formality.”
“I’m sure there’s a good reason,” Kyle offered, generously, he thought. He took a seat in the suggested chair.
“Do you know everyone?” Paris asked.
Kyle looked at the two strangers. “Almost,” he replied. “I haven’t had the pleasure.”
“Right, sorry,” Paris said. With appropriate arm movements, he added, “Captain Sistek and Captain Munro. Kyle Riker.”
“Pleasure,” Kyle muttered, convinced that it would not be.
The conference room was anonymously Starfleet—lots of gray and silver, with no windows and mostly undecorated walls. The wall behind Owen Paris had a large reproduction of Starfleet’s arrowhead symbol mounted on it, and the wall Kyle faced had a holoimage of the old NCC-1701 Enterprisesoaring through space. It looked like a room meant to emphasize that what was discussed in it was more important than the surroundings.
“The reason we’ve brought you here, Kyle,” Paris began, “with all these people and all the special treatment, is that an accusation has been made against you. An accusation that, should it be true—and let me say at the outset that I don’t believe it to be—but if I’m wrong and it were true, would be a very serious matter indeed.”
“Does this have something to do with last night?” Kyle asked. “Because if it does—”
Owen Paris waved away his question. “No, not at all,” he said. “I’m sure you had a terrible night because of that, and I guarantee we’ll get to the bottom of it. But this is a completely separate matter.”
“Okay, then,” Kyle said. “Please excuse the interruption.”
“Feel free to speak at any time,” Paris told him. “This is not a formal hearing of any kind, just a—well, let’s say a casual meeting to make you aware of what’s going on.”
“If I’m being accused of something, that doesn’t sound very casual,” Kyle pointed out.
“That may have been a poor word choice,” Paris admitted. “There has been an accusation made, to Vice Admiral Bonner, but so far no evidence has been presented to support it. We’re not at the stage of bringing formal charges, or doing anything other than launching an investigation that I suspect will be fruitless. But the matter, having been raised, can’t be dropped without the investigation.”