“Wait,” he heard.

He didn’t recognize Carson’s voice because Carson had never spoken, not in the whole time he’d been cared for here. But the room was otherwise empty; there was no one else it could have been. Messina turned around, and Carson was trying to get out of the chair. His muscles, atrophied by inactivity, didn’t seem to be cooperating. “I ... can’t ...” he muttered.

Messina rushed to help him. “Carson, hold on. Don’t push it,” he said. “Let me—”

As soon as he was close, Carson lunged from the chair, no atrophied muscles holding him back at all. He caught the unsuspecting Messina in a headlock, powerful arms encircling Messina’s throat. Messina tried to cry out an alarm but he couldn’t make a sound. He felt Carson’s arms shifting, and then his world turned black.

Carson dropped the red-shirted man on the floor, his neck snapped. That was not the man he wanted, he knew. That was just a man who was in his way. The man he wanted was in the city, though. Not far away. He would find that man, the one he wanted, and he would snap his neck too. Or do something else; he would decide when he found him. The means wasn’t important. It was the goal he cared about.

The man was in the city, at last, and the man had to die.

Chapter 32

“Ahead warp five,” Captain Pressman instructed.

“Ahead warp five,” Ensign Riker echoed. He touched the control panel and imagined he could feel the burst of speed, the g-forces pressing him into his seat, as the Pegasusaccelerated dramatically. It really was just his imagination. The g-force of a warp five acceleration would smear everyone on the bridge against the rear bulkhead if it could truly be felt, and those who were standing remained in place, just fine, even as the stars outside seemed to blur and stretch. He remembered a tidbit of old Earth history, at the advent of railroads; some people believed that trains would never work because at the speed they hurtled along nobody would be able to stand up.

After a few days of slow and steady progress into space, this was the first time they had traveled at warp, and Will couldn’t help being excited. Space travel had already begun to feel routine to him. He realized he wasn’t the most patient guy in the world, but he’d started to wonder when something would happen. Then, today, it had.

Captain Pressman had received a call that he’d taken in his ready room, and when he’d come back onto the bridge, his entire attitude had changed. He was brisk and efficient at the best of times, but now he was all business. “We’ve been sent on an emergency mission,” he said. “Go to yellow alert, full enable status.”

“Is there a threat, sir?” Marc Boylen asked.

“Not that we know of,” the captain answered. “Yet. But there will be.” He turned his attention to Will. “Set a course for Candelar IV, Mr. Riker.”

Will had relayed that instruction to the ship’s computer, which had set the course automatically. Then Captain Pressman had dictated the speed, and Will knew that this really was a matter of some urgency. Warp five was somewhere around a hundred times the speed of light, a concept that simply boggled Will’s mind when he really thought about it. Warp technology was a fact of life, and always had been. But the idea that he, a kid from Valdez, would be at the conn of a spacecraft traveling so fast that if he’d been watching it from Prince William Sound would have been gone before he could even see it, was hard to imagine.

And yet, here he was. Traveling at warp five to a destination he’d never even heard of, much less considered visiting. He wanted to know why they were headed to Candelar IV in such a rush, but he didn’t want to be the one to ask.

Finally, though, Commander Barry Chamish did. “What’s the emergency, Captain?” he wondered.

“It seems that Endyk Plure has been captured,” Pressman said simply.

“ TheEndyk Plure?” Marc Boylen asked. “Wanted for war crimes on at least a half dozen planets?”

“That’s the one, Mr. Boylen,” Pressman replied. “Hundreds of thousands dead, thanks to his predacity. At a bare minimum. On worlds throughout the Candelar system.”

“Sounds like a good thing to me,” Barry said.

“It is a very good thing,” Pressman agreed. “But the Federation wants him to stand trial in a Federation court. They want the trial to be fair and above reproach.”

“They don’t believe he’ll get a fair trial there?” Shinnareth Bestor asked from ops.

“They don’t believe he’ll live to see his trial date,” Pressman said. “He’s being held at the most secure facility on Candelar IV. But there are already mobs surrounding the prison, calling for his head. It’s positively medieval, apparently. The locals are desperate for someone to get Plure off the planet and into Federation custody as quickly as possible. We’re the nearest Starfleet ship, so we’re elected.”

“Which will make us very unpopular when we arrive,” Marc observed. “Hence the yellow alert.”

“That’s correct,” Pressman noted. “If they get wind of our approach, the Candelarans may even try to intercept us. Not the authorities, but the citizens.”

Will felt an unfamiliar tension squeeze his gut at this discussion. He had wanted to do something—anything. He hadn’t wanted to simply cruise around space without apparent purpose—“exploring” for the sake of exploration. Now they had a purpose, a mission, and it sounded like a dangerous one. There was an element of excitement to it all, but also a nagging fear. His life had been in danger before—certainly when he’d followed Paul Rice onto Saturn’s moon, it had. But he hadn’t had a lot of time to think about it then. This time, he was in control of the ship, intentionally flying them right toward certain trouble.

He smiled, though he tried to hide it from the rest of the bridge crew. This is it,he thought. This is what I signed on for.

“Mr. Riker,” Captain Pressman said sharply. “My office. Mr. Chamish, you have the bridge.”

“Aye, sir,” Barry said.

Will gulped and followed the captain to his ready room, just off the bridge. He wondered if he’d done something wrong. He couldn’t imagine what. He’d brought the ship into orbit around Candelar IV, outside visual range from the surface, as instructed. They had made good time and arrived without incident.

When he entered the ready room, Captain Pressman was already sitting down behind a large desk. The door shut as soon as he walked through. This was the first time Will had seen inside it. The walls were a warm beige, set off by a cool blue carpet. Over the captain’s right shoulder was a large window, through which Will could see Candelar IV’s ocher sphere. Directly behind him was a shelf on which stood a small bronze sculpture that Will recognized as a Frederic Remington bronze, an old-fashioned Earth cowboy trying to hang on to a horse that reared up to avoid the strike of a rattlesnake. As if to demonstrate that he was not entirely old-fashioned, Pressman had put a model of an Ambassador-class starship on the shelf next to his Remington bronze.

“Sir?” Will asked, standing at attention.

Pressman fixed him with an unwavering gaze. “Nice flying, son,” he said. “I know it wasn’t particularly difficult, but you did what you were told to do without asking a lot of questions, and you got us here. Now we just have to get Plure off the planet and get out of here again.”

“Yes, sir,” Will said.

“At ease, Will,” Pressman said. “You prefer Will, correct? Not William? That’s what your file said.”

“That’s what I’m used to, sir,” Will answered, relaxing his stance a little.

“I make snap judgments about people, Will,” Pressman said. “Sometimes I’m told that I shouldn’t. That it’s a bad thing, a dangerous thing. Trouble is, more often than not, I’m right. My judgments are borne out in practice. So I keep doing it.”