“That’s true,” Marden agreed. “But still—it was a stupid thing to do.”

“I won’t argue with that.”

“But at the same time,” Marden went on, “I couldn’t help sympathizing with them.”

“With the mob?” Will asked, slightly surprised. “They wanted to lynch Plure.”

Marden nodded. “And Handihar is one of the worlds he plundered,” he reminded Will. “A hundred thousand dead, there, more or less. Basically so he could extort a payment from them to make him go away. And the payment has almost utterly destroyed their economy. Handihar is a backward place, Will. Tribal, low-tech. Not wealthy. And not able to stand up to a heavily armed madman like Endyk Plure on their own.”

“Well, he’s in Starfleet hands now. A Federation trial will be fair, and he’ll be appropriately dealt with when it’s over.”

“Luwadis was right about that,” Marden argued. “There’s no fair way to deal with such a person. The best he should be able to hope for is a slow, agonizing death.”

“I understand how you feel, Marden,” Will assured him.

“I don’t think you do, Will. Those were my people. Distantly related, but still. Endyk Plure has to die for what he did, and I’m afraid that Federation justice won’t do the job.”

“So what do you propose?” Will asked. He wasn’t at all sure what Marden was driving at.

“I’ve got full access to the brig,” Marden said. “And I know the shift schedule. I can take care of it tonight, before we reach the transfer point.”

“No!” Will was shocked that Marden would even suggest something like that. “Marden, you can’t. You’re Starfleet. We have rules. Principles. You can’t just abandon those.”

“Yes, we have principles,” Marden said, leaning forward in the chair now. “But don’t you agree that some principles outweigh others? The idea that Endyk Plure’s life might be spared, in spite of all the deaths he’s caused—I just can’t take that. It’s repugnant to me.”

“But to take it all into your own hands ... how is that better?”

“It’s better because I would be killing one man, the killer of thousands. It’s just simple math, Will. One for many.”

“It’s more than math,” Will countered. “It’s what’s right and wrong. You can’t just decide for yourself that he’s guilty and decide his punishment.”

Marden stood up and paced around Will’s small room. “His punishment seems obvious to me. How could it be otherwise? Someone who is responsible for so many deaths ...”

“I’m just saying, there’s a system to determine that. When you put on the uniform of Starfleet, you agreed to enforce that system.”

“But, Will ... he ...” Marden looked down at Will, still sitting back on his own bed, and his face was full of anguish. Will felt bad for the man, but not so bad that he could agree with his plan. As tired as he was, he realized that if he could just keep Marden here, talking, maybe they’d get to the point where they were to transfer Endyk Plure to another vessel before Marden could throw away his own career. He could almost kick himself for the inspiration, but he felt he had to try.

“Tell me about Handihar, Marden. What did your grandfather tell you about it?”

Marden smiled for the first time, a little wistfully, as if remembering pleasant times with his grandfather. He drifted back over to the chair and sat down again. “Like I said, it’s mostly a tribal society,” he began. “Close to the land. It’s a big planet, huge, I guess, according to him, and his part of it is densely forested. Junglelike. They live in wooden structures, not much more than huts, I think. The air is so humid that the buildings have to be replaced on a pretty regular basis. My grandfather left there when he was a young man, but from what he has told me it’s still mostly that way.”

“Sounds pleasant,” Will said, just to keep Marden talking.

“I’ve always wanted to visit,” Marden told him, smiling a little as he thought about it. “He makes it sound kind of like paradise. But ... there’s one story he told me, Will. I think maybe it especially applies, in this case.”

Will had just wanted him to reminisce about the planet, trying to keep him away from the subject of Endyk Plure. But he guessed that sitting here talking was still better than seeking the guy out in the brig and killing him. “What story?” he asked.

Marden took a deep breath. Apparently it’s going to be a long one,Will thought. He hoped he could stay awake for it.

“Have you ever heard of a gralipha?”Marden asked by way of beginning.

Will racked his brain but couldn’t recall that he had.

“It’s a huge, wild beast,” Marden explained. “Many legged, and with a massive, heavy skull, horned on the top. Almost like some kind of Earth dinosaur, I think. Anyway, this story that my father’s family passed down, for generations, was about the time a graliphaattacked his family’s village. Just came in out of the jungle and ran around in a blind rage, berserk, smashing huts, killing with abandon. The people were taken by surprise—they lived with graliphasin the jungle all the time, but none had ever charged the village like this. They couldn’t do much to fight back—it was all they could do to try to stay out of its way. It cut a swath through the village and then left, back into the jungle it had come from.”

“Sounds kind of like those stories of rogue elephants,” Will suggested. “How they’d sometimes attack Indian villages.”

Marden nodded. “Very much like that. Except this thing was at least twice the size of any elephant. Or, that’s how my grandfather tells the story, anyway.”

“What did they do? The villagers.”

“They picked up after the attack. They buried their dead, they tended to the wounded, they rebuilt their homes and fortified the log wall around the village. Then they went into their culturally prescribed mourning period. For days, they mourned the dead, weeping and laying offerings at their graves. This was, grandfather said, how his people honored their dead.

“What they didn’t do was go after the gralipha.And six days later, it came back. It tore through the brand new fence like it was paper, and ran amuck again. More homes fell, more people died. Children and the elderly and those hurt in the first attack, especially, because they couldn’t dodge it in time.”

“That’s terrible,” Will said.

“It was. My grandfather can barely hold back the tears when he tells the story. Some of his ancestors—mine too, I guess—died in these attacks.

“But this time, the villagers reacted differently. They left the rebuilding and the mourning for later. They organized into hunting parties and they followed the path the beast made when it left the village. They tracked it. When they caught up to it, there was a terrible battle. More lives were lost. The thing swung its head and its horns gouged and tore at the villagers. Their weapons were just primitive spears and arrows and slings—they could barely penetrate its tough hide.

“They didn’t give up, though. They continued the fight. Eventually, their weapons found tender spots—the eyes, the roof of the mouth, the base of the neck. They brought the mad graliphadown, and they killed it, even though the cost was high. Because this was the only way they could guarantee that it would not return to their village later.”

Will understood. He shifted his position, sitting cross-legged on the bed with his spine straight. “So Endyk Plure is your gralipha,” he said.

Marden nodded. “He’s rampaged through the village once too often. If he’s not stopped at the first opportunity—that means now, tonight—there’s still the chance that he’ll escape and come back. His forces might be closing in on the Pegasuseven now. The authorities on Candelar IV said they wanted the Federation to take him so he’d get a fair trial, and so the mobs wouldn’t storm the prison, but I’m convinced that they were just as worried about Plure’s troops coming to his rescue.”