The officer looked back toward the head sticking up from the troop carrier’s bowels like a turtle’s. The Cyrian wobbled his hand back and forth in affirmation.

“Cividon, you bastard,” Kyle heard Michelle mutter under her breath. He knew that Cividon must have been part of Michelle’s unit, the one who had been arrested after the parade. Cividon had turned on his movement’s leaders easily, Kyle realized. He knew only the false names, but Michelle’s false name had been real enough to cause this trouble.

She couldn’t have known that any of this would happen, or that a single other soul on the planet knew Kyle’s name wasn’t Joe Brady. If he had just kept quiet, there would have been no trouble.

If he’d kept quiet, though, The End would have been razed, its residents slaughtered.

He couldn’t have kept quiet then. Michelle wouldn’t have either. There really had been no other choice.

The weapons trained on Kyle shifted, aiming at Michelle. Kyle felt himself trembling. Michelle had been there, and visible, at the parade. Cividon had fingered her. She was in serious trouble, and he couldn’t figure out how to get her out of it. Even if he started something, there were too many soldiers, too many weapons, to fight.

“Michelle ...” he started.

“Don’t, Joe,” she said urgently. “Old Earth expression. I’ve made my bed.”

“But ...”

The officer pushed Cividon back into the troop carrier and climbed in himself. When only his own head remained outside, he barked an instruction to the troops. “Kill her!”

The soldiers didn’t hesitate. A dozen energy beams blasted at Michelle, all at once. One moment she had been standing there, and the next she had dissolved into a fine spray which coated Kyle. Watching open-mouthed, he tasted her on his tongue and knew that she was on his skin and clothes and hair, in his eyes and nose. What was left of Michelle he and the street and the wall behind them had absorbed.

Blinded by fury and the Michelle-mist, Kyle threw himself toward the soldiers. He didn’t have a chance against them, with their armor and weapons, and he knew it, but he didn’t care. He battered them with fists and feet, tears streaming down his face as he took their blows in return. Finally, one brought the stock of a weapon down against his head and he staggered back a few steps, the world spinning crazily away from him, and he fell down in the street, unconscious.

Chapter 25

This is no fun at all!Will thought.

It had started out looking as if it might be. The flying exercises were, as Will had expected, mundane, even boring. He knew his stuff by now, and so did the rest of the cadets selected for this journey. It was almost a punishment rather than a reward, particularly since he knew he was missing the chance to listen to Spock.

But Paul Rice, maybe looking to add some spice to the trip, had challenged Will to a friendly race. He’d done it in front of their friends, and he’d pressed it even when Will had tried to laugh it off.

“I thought you were a flyer, Riker,” he’d said. “I thought maybe you had some nerve. But I guess your by-the-book attitude has killed that, huh? Stolen your courage along with your skills?”

“I can outfly you anytime,” Will said, though he knew it wasn’t true. Paul was still one of the best natural pilots he’d ever encountered. “I don’t need to break the rules to know that.”

“Funny,” Paul said, gesturing toward the other cadets who had gathered in a circle, watching them. “They don’t know that. I don’t know that. Seems like maybe you’re the only one who thinks so.”

“If you think that matters to me in the least, Paul, you’re sadly mistaken.”

“My only mistake was thinking you had any guts at all,” Paul shot back. “Remind me not to accept a posting on any starship that’s got you on it. I want brave officers on my team, not cowards.”

Will knew that Paul didn’t mean it. Despite appearances, they were still good friends. Paul was just trying to wheedle him, to push him into playing along with his stunt. The problem was, even though Will knew that, it was working anyway. And when some of the other cadets started piling onto Paul’s side, he knew it was hopeless.

“Yeah, Riker,” Donaldson jeered. “What are you afraid of?”

“Okay, okay,” Will relented. “If it means that much to you, I’ll do it.”

This drew a round of approval from the gathered cadets, and Will felt his stomach sink even as he agreed to it. What Paul wanted was a race, one against one— mano a mano,as he put it. But they had completed their flights for the day, and they didn’t have personal ships to race in. Which meant they would have to—Paul had used the term “borrow”—two shuttles from the Academy Flight Range orbiting Saturn. There would be some security, of course, but that was mostly geared toward keeping outsiders from coming in, not wayward cadets from leaving. Liberating the two shuttles could be done. Flying them would raise an alarm, though, and returning unnoticed would be impossible.

The trip would be relatively short, just around Phoebe, one of Saturn’s many moons, and back. Once Will had agreed to it they had suited up, made sure the two Type-6 shuttles were prepped, and with some other cadets distracting the shuttlebay crew, they’d made their getaway. Will recognized the stupidity of his action—he had come here instead of letting Trinidad take his place because he didn’t want to break a comparatively minor rule, and now here he was smashing a huge one. But he’d still thought they would be able to get away with it, and if they flew well, they might even get away with just a minor talking to instead of a real punishment.

But that had been before things started to go wrong. Now he knew that he’d be lucky to avoid expulsion. If he even lived long enough to be expelled.

Will had been first out of the bay, but not by much. He thought he was coaxing every available ounce of speed from the shuttle, but somehow Paul found more and pulled ahead. Will had stayed close behind, though, as they neared Phoebe. Circling the moon and whipping back would require the most careful flying—she was large enough to have a faint gravitational pull, and the trick was to get in close enough to make a narrow turn without getting so close it bogged you down. Paul was, Will thought, going in closer than was necessary or wise. He’d been tempted to follow suit, but then had noticed his instrument panels reacting violently and had pulled back.

This is trouble,Will thought. Unless he misread his instruments, Paul was caught in an ion storm near the moon’s surface. That was when Will decided that he was not, in fact, having any fun at all. He tapped his combadge. “Paul! Are you all right?”

What he heard back was static, and then Paul’s voice, fragmented and breaking up. “... trouble... storm is making... can’t pull... ”

Paul’s ship disappeared from his viewscreen then, though he could still follow its progress on his instrument panel. It seemed to be diving toward Phoebe’s surface. “Paul, get out of there!”

He heard only static in reply.

“Emergency, Starfleet Academy Flight Range,” Will called out, “this is shuttle—hell, I don’t know what shuttle I have. Do you read me?”

“We have you,”a voice answered. “Where’s the other one?”

“You need to make an emergency transport,” Will insisted. “He’s going down on Phoebe.”

“We can’t even see him, Cadet,”the voice reported. “We can’t get a lock. There seems to be some interference.”

“It’s an ion storm,” Will told the voice. “That’s why he’s lost control of his shuttle.”

“He lost control because he tried to fly a shuttle that was in for repairs into an ion storm,”the voice said. “We’ll send an emergency evac team out after him, but we can’t transport him off there with the storm going on.”