“If it works for you, sir, I don’t see the problem.”

“There it is, Will, in a nutshell. It works for me. And I have to say, my judgment about you has been formed from precious little evidence. You’ve sat on my bridge for a few days, you’ve flown my ship, and you haven’t said much. The few times you have opened your mouth have been to ask intelligent questions or to offer opinions, most of which make sense to me. I’ve read your file, of course, and I know you had some rough times at the Academy, but I also know that you graduated near the top of your class and were quite an accomplished cadet.”

“I did my best, sir.”

“I’m sure you did. So here it is, Ensign Riker. I’m sending an away team to the planet to pick up Endyk Plure. I want you to be part of that team.”

“Me, sir?” Will asked, realizing even as the words passed his lips how stupid it sounded. The captain hadn’t been talking to anyone else.

“You, Will. I have a good feeling about you. I think you’ll prove to be a smart, capable Starfleet officer, destined for accomplishment. I don’t know what it’ll take to turn you from a raw rookie helm jockey into the kind of officer I think you can be, but my guess is that you need experience. Lots of different kinds of experience. An away mission like this one is something that doesn’t come along all that often, so I want you to be part of it. The way I see it, if you’re going to start collecting experience, there’s no time like the present, right?”

“I suppose that’s true, sir.”

“Do you see the statue behind me, Will? The cowboy?”

Will didn’t know how anyone could miss it. “Yes, sir.”

“The popular myth is that cowboys were loners. The rugged individual. Do you know what that is, Will?”

He didn’t know what the captain meant, precisely. “No, sir.”

“It’s a load of hooey,” Pressman declared. “Maybe they were, to some extent, in the sense that it was hard for a cowboy to marry and settle down, since he was out on the range for several months of the year, going off on six-month long cattle drives and the like. But the fact is, every cowboy worked as part of a team. They worked for a ranch. One cowboy can’t control a herd of cattle, or string an entire fence, or do much of anything else by himself. Cowboys were team players, and they all had to pull their weight. That’s why I keep that statue behind me—to remind everyone who stands where you are that we’re all part of a team here.”

“Makes sense, sir.”

“And the ship next to it, in case you’re wondering, is the Zhukov.First vessel I served on. Captain D’Emilio is the one who taught me the value of team play. We’re all in this together, is what he used to say. The two statues pretty much sum up my philosophy of command.”

“I see, sir.”

“Not yet, you don’t,” Pressman argued. “But you will. And you’ll start the process today, when you go down to Candelar IV. Be careful down there—when you get back, you’ll need to get us out of here fast.”

Will beamed down to the prison on Candelar IV with a trio from security: Florence Williams, Marden Zaffos, and the chief, Lt. Teilhard Aronson. Hendry Luwadis, the director of the prison, was waiting for them anxiously, and practically wept with relief when they materialized in his office.

“What took you so long?” he wanted to know.

“We came as quickly as we could,” Lt. Aronson assured him. “We were the nearest Starfleet ship, but we were still quite a distance away.”

“When we joined the Federation,” Luwadis said, “I thought we’d be better served by our membership. But this ... leaving us with this killer on our hands ...”

“Sir, we’re here to take him off your hands.” Lt. Aronson spoke with a soothing tone, but Luwadis was not easily soothed.

Glancing at the surroundings, Will began to understand his problem. This was not a highly developed world. Advanced enough to qualify for Federation membership, but probably just barely. The structure they were in, the main prison administration building, was made of stone. The office was full of uniformed, armed guards, but their weapons looked relatively primitive compared to the phaser rifle in Will’s hands. Even Luwadis’s clothing, a coppery suit a few shades darker than his skin, looked rough-hewn, as if it had been made by hand, by someone not particularly skilled or imaginative.

“You can understand how they feel,” Luwadis went on, waving a hand toward the large glass doors that led out onto a balcony. “The mob, I mean. Plure has killed more of us than anyone wants to think about. The mob wants him dead. So do I, for that matter. But we’ve agreed, by joining the Federation, to abide by Federation standards of justice. Plure should have a trial, and then he should be punished. Without that, there will be no guarantee that he is, in fact, the one responsible for all the crimes he’s been accused of. I’d rather have certainty than a quick death, even in this case.”

“You made the right decision,” Aronson said. “He’ll have a fair trial. If he’s guilty—which, on the face of it, seems pretty evident—he’ll be punished appropriately.”

“Appropriately?” Luwadis echoed. “Can he be killed seven hundred thousand times?”

“I don’t know much about his physiology, sir,” Aronson replied. “But I’d guess he can only be killed once.”

“Yes, yes, which is why you’ve got to get him out of here.”

Will noticed that Zaffos, probably made curious by Luwadis’s gesture toward the balcony, had edged closer to the doors there. Will started to move, as subtly as he could, to intercept Zaffos if he should decide to go outside. But the continued conversation between Luwadis and Aronson had distracted him, and Zaffos took two quick steps before Will could stop him.

“Wow,” he heard Zaffos say. “He’s not kidding.”

Will lunged onto the balcony. He spared only a glance toward the prison walls. Beyond them, what looked like thousands—tens of thousands, maybe—teemed, pressing up against the walls as if trying to knock them down by sheer weight of numbers. Will grabbed Zaffos’s gold-sleeved arm and tugged him toward the door. “Get back inside,” he urged. “We’re supposed to stay out of sight, remember?”

“Here, here!” Luwadis shouted from inside the office. “Don’t go out there! If they see you—”

Will and Zaffos stepped back inside and Will pushed the doors closed. But it was too late. A deafening cry rose up from the crowd on the other side of the walls. Will couldn’t make out many words, but he thought sure he heard “Starfleet” among the furious din.

“I ... I’m sorry,” Zaffos said quickly. “It’s my fault. I wanted to see.”

Luwadis scowled at him. “You wanted to see? You wanted to touch off a riot, that’s what you wanted to do!”

Will risked another glance outside. Luwadis was right. The mob’s angry cries had grown louder, and now he could see that some of them had gained the top of the wall. Prison guards were rushing to quell them, but they were vastly outnumbered and maybe even outgunned.

“Get out,” Luwadis insisted. “Get out of here, and take Plure with you, or we’re all dead!”

Four guards approached through an open doorway, surrounding a prisoner. Endyk Plure was as dangerous-looking as his reputation implied. He was a big, beefy individual, with coppery coloring similar to Luwadis’s. His muscles strained at the sleeves of the plain prison-issue tunic he wore. His face, unshaven for at least a week, was solid, jaw square, mouth cruel. His eyes were small and did not reflect much intelligence, Will thought, but maybe a vicious cunning. He stared defiantly at the Starfleet team that had come to collect him, but didn’t speak. Will knew that appearances could be deceiving, but in this case he was pretty sure that he could have picked Endyk out as a mass murderer in any lineup.

“You’re coming with us, Plure,” Aronson said. “To stand trial in a Federation court for war crimes and mass murder.”