Hoping that maybe his former friend had cooled off a bit, Will stopped him. “Hey, Dennis, congratulations,” he said with all sincerity.

“Thanks,” Dennis said. He faced Will but there was no hint of a smile on his ruddy face. “Heard you were at the top of the class.”

“Eighth,” Will corrected. Kul Tun Osir had been first. “Not all the way.”

“You know where I finished, Will?” Dennis asked. He made it sound like a challenge.

“I really don’t,” Will admitted.

“Dead last,” Dennis told him. “That’s quite an accomplishment, isn’t it? Nobodywas able to do worse than me. When it comes to being bad, I’m the best.” He glared at Will, who simply watched him, straight-faced.

“You may have finished last,” Will said finally. “But you still finished. You’re here, the same as the rest of us.”

“I sure am,” Dennis said. “I’m here, and I did it by myself. No help from you, obviously, and none from anyone else either. Just my own efforts, my own two hands, and my own barely adequate brain.”

“I think you’re being a little hard on yourself, Dennis,” Will said. “On yourself and everyone else.”

“If you’d been in my shoes, you wouldn’t necessarily think that,” Dennis shot back. “But, luckily for you and Starfleet, you didn’t have to find out.”

“I’m sure your contribution to Starfleet will be an important one,” Will suggested.

“Maybe if I was going into Starfleet,” Dennis said. “But I’m not.”

“But ... you graduated from the Academy!” Will was dumfounded. “Even if you don’t want to join Starfleet—and I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t—you kind of have to now, don’t you?”

“You’d think so, huh?” Dennis asked. “But it turns out there’s a kind of special dispensation for cases like mine. It’s possible to do just well enough to make it through the Academy but still bad enough that they won’t make you enlist if you choose not to. They don’t really want me, any more than I want them.”

People were streaming around them now, graduates and family members alike, and Dennis had raised his voice to the point that people cast sidelong glances at them and tried to give them wide berth.

“I guess I just don’t understand,” Will said. “I thought the whole reason you put yourself through this was that you wanted to be in Starfleet.”

Finally, Dennis smiled. “I thought that too,” he said. “But you know what happened, Will? I met you.”

“Me?”

“You, Will. I think you’ll have a brilliant Starfleet career. You’ll be some big hotshot senior officer, probably a captain someday, or an admiral. And that’s exactly why I want nothing to do with Starfleet. Because the system rewards people who are willing to turn their backs on their friends, who will sacrifice friendships for advancement and accomplishment. You’ll thrive in that kind of atmosphere, Riker. But I want no part of it. I’m going home, back to the farm. At least there when you’re up to your ankles in manure, you know where you really stand.”

Will felt anger overtake him. “I feel like I want to say I’m sorry you feel that way, Dennis,” he said. “But really, I’m not. Whatever problems you think you have with Starfleet you really have with yourself. How you did in school is no one’s fault but your own. You can’t blame anyone else for that. You could have asked for help at any point, and you could have accepted help when it was offered. You could have pulled your own weight like the rest of us did. You chose not to, well, those are the choices you make. But then don’t go trying to blame others, or the ‘system,’ for your shortcomings. As Dr. McCoy might have said, that dog don’t hunt.”

Dennis shot Will a look of anger much like the one he’d left him with the night he’d demanded help. “Leave it to you to kiss up even when you don’t have to, Riker,” he said. “McCoy can’t hear you now. But it’s perfect for a Starfleet drone like you. Have a good life, Will. I’ll think of you every time I swamp out the barn or feed the hogs.”

Dennis turned and shoved his way through the crowd, leaving Will standing there watching him go. Dennis had really ticked him off—refusing to accept responsibility for one’s own actions was something Will hated, and Dennis seemed intent on making a lifelong pattern of it. But part of him couldn’t help feeling hurt, wounded, by Dennis’s accusation, and by the bitter tone in his one-time friend’s voice. And underneath the anger there was another feeling—a vague idea that maybe Dennis was right about more than Will wanted to admit. Felicia had implied many of the same things about him.

Will was excited about getting posted to a starship and seeing some action, but at the same time, he thought, a change of scenery might be a good opportunity to take a long, hard look at his own life. It might just be,he thought, that it’s time to make some changes.

Chapter 29

More than a year had passed since Kyle Riker had last seen Earth, and the sight of his home planet filling the shuttle’s viewscreen filled him with a sense of joy that took him by surprise. He knew there were still dangers ahead, and difficult times, but he would meet them on his home turf and face them in a way that he hadn’t been equipped for when he had let them drive him away before.

Getting to this point had been a challenge, to be sure. The night Michelle died had ranked right up there with the worst nights of his life. The police had been out in force that night, he remembered, clustered together in groups on street corners, armored and tense. They had stared at him as he passed by, a ragged-looking man with what might have been blood sprayed across his face and clothing, but they hadn’t stopped him. He figured he looked too beaten down to be much of a threat.

Kyle knew that when things went downhill they would happen fast, but even he was unprepared for the velocity and brutality of the next morning’s events. Instead of waiting for Cetra and the others to give themselves up, the army simply returned to The End in full force, with far more soldiers and machines than they had used the day before. The tanks rumbled into the old part of Cozzen five abreast, not paying attention to where the roads wound. They made their own roads. The ancient buildings barely slowed them down. When they approached one that looked more substantial than the rest they simply fired upon it before they got to it, their energy beams lancing across the early morning landscape and blowing huge chunks from the walls. Then the tanks rolled forward, their sheer mass finishing the job their guns had started. Soldiers, on foot and in troop carriers, came behind, using their handheld weapons on any who survived the destruction of their homes. Smaller and weaker structures were merely ground into dust by the big machines.

Kyle had finally fallen asleep in an alley, but the thunder and crash of the army’s advance woke him up early. It took a few moments to get his bearings—he felt hungover, though this hangover had only to do with grief, not with drink—but once he figured out where he was, he ran through the chaotic streets to Cetra’s place to warn her. When he got there, he saw that a police unit had already raided her place. As Kyle watched, helpless to stop it, Cetra was led out of the building with her hands in shackles by five uniformed police officers, the shortest of whom towered over her by half a meter. Another dozen stood outside the building around an armored vehicle, as casually as if this were any other day, any other job.

“Cetra!” Kyle cried, oblivious to the risk this raised for him.

“It’s okay, Joe,” she said, tossing him her most gentle, motherly smile. “You can’t worry about me. You take care of what you can.” The police led her into the vehicle and slammed the doors.

Taking care of what he could was his intention, although he thought it might sadden Cetra to know that his goal had nothing to do with Cyre, or Hazimot. Michelle had come to the conclusion long ago that her future was here on Hazimot— such as it was,he thought bitterly—but that Kyle belonged back on Earth. He never had told her any details of his troubles there, but she insisted that the time would come when he’d have to go back and face them. “You’ll never be really at peace until you do,” she said. “Even with me, you’ll always be unhappy, unfinished. I’d hate for you to leave me, but you need to return there someday.”