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, the 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.”