“You could be right,” Will admitted. “Although I doubt that Plure’s forces would want to risk an attack on Starfleet. Against the Candelar system—and I don’t mean to be dismissive, just realistic—they were tough guys. But that’s a pretty backward system. Against Starfleet, they’d be schoolyard bullies facing down real adults with real firepower. They wouldn’t have a chance. And the thing about bullies is, they only like to fight the weak. They usually leave the strong well enough alone.”

“Possibly,” Marden said. “But even if they don’t come for him, I won’t be convinced that he’ll never escape until I see him dead with my own eyes. And it wasn’t just ancient ancestors that he killed on Handihar, but family. My grandfather’s two sisters, and their entire families. There are just too many reasons for him to die, and none that I can see to let him live.”

“Except your career, and the oath you swore to uphold Federation law,” Will pointed out.

“That’s one argument, Will,” Marden said. “I’m just not sure it’s a good enough argument.”

Will had felt something nagging at him while Marden told his story, and now he remembered what it was. A story of his own, from his younger days, that might also be applicable. He closed his eyes for a minute, knowing that to do so was to risk falling right to sleep, but wanting to get the story straight in his mind before he started telling it. And when he did, it all came rushing back to him, as clear as if it had been yesterday.

It had been his fourteenth summer, he recalled. Valdez, still a small town, sat at the edge of one of the greatest wilderness areas in North America, but even so, he was beginning to feel constricted, limited, and impatient to see more of the world. But halfway through the summer, there was an event that promised diversion, and he welcomed it.

A campsite in the nearby wilderness had been attacked by a grizzly—a rogue, one of the campers said, enormous and vicious. The bear had torn though the tents, upending food lockers, and maiming one of the campers. The remaining campers—there had been, Will recalled, eight in all-had survived, and determined that someone needed to kill the bear before someone else was hurt. Some of the local people in Valdez volunteered to find the animal, agreeing that a rogue grizzly could be bad for their community and needed to be put down.

Will’s father was one of the volunteers. Will insisted that he should be allowed to go along. His father argued, but not very energetically, and he changed his mind more easily than Will had even anticipated. So they each got a phaser rifle and they joined the hunting party leaving from the campground early on the morning after the attack.

As they walked through the forests and meadows of the wilderness area, weapons at the ready, alert for any signs of the bear, Kyle Riker was more talkative than usual. “This is nice,” he had said. “I mean, not the idea that we have to kill a grizzly before it kills one of us. But being out here in the sunshine and the trees, with a blue sky over our heads, a father and son together ... we don’t do this sort of thing often enough, Will. We never have. My fault, I guess, and I’m sorry.”

He had stopped in the middle of the trail then, and laid a hand softly on Will’s shoulder—the kind of physical contact that was rare between this father and son. “I’m sorry for a lot of things,” he had said. “More than you can imagine. I hope one day you’ll understand why I’ve done things the way I have. I hope I’ve made some good choices, even when they haven’t seemed like it. A day like this, being out here with you—Will, you’re a man, look at you! I’m sure there are still things you need to learn, but I’m not so sure that I can teach them.”

He had gone quiet then, more like the father that Will was used to, the one who kept his feelings bottled up inside as if they were poison, and they had continued tracking the bear. When they’d lost the trail for a while, Will had found it by scouting in ever-wider circles until he cut across it, and Kyle had clapped him on the back. “You’ll be fine, Will. You’ll be just fine,” he had said. Will hadn’t realized then—hadn’t realized until just this moment, sitting in his quarters on the starship Pegasuswith Marden Zaffos, what Kyle had meant by that. He had known then that he was going to leave, going to abandon Will to his fate. The way Will handled a gun, the way he cut bear track—those were pretty meaningless skills, in the greater scheme of things, but somehow Kyle Riker had decided that they meant Will was mature enough to make his own way in the world.

They had, later that day, found the bear. She had a den, and when the hunting party approached she had growled ferociously and lunged at them. But several of the hunters fired at once, and the bear fell without any human casualties.

Inside the den, though, they found something that cast a different light on things. There were three cubs inside the den—dead cubs, bearing wounds that could only have been made with phasers. None of the campers had claimed to be hunters, and indeed none of them had joined this hunt. But they’d been the only ones out in this area that any of the townspeople knew about.

The hunting party returned to the campground and ransacked the tents until they found the hidden phaser rifles. The campers protested, denied, and then finally, faced with the evidence, admitted their guilt. They had tracked the bear for sport, finding her den and killing her cubs just because they could. It hadn’t occurred to them that the animals were an endangered species, that they had done something stupid and shameful, until it was too late. And when the bear came to their campsite, she was only seeking revenge for her loss.

Will told Marden the story in as much detail as he could remember, and when it was over Marden looked puzzled.

“Are you saying revenge is never legitimate?” he asked.

“Not at all, Marden. I’m just saying it’s something you have to be careful with. It’s more complicated than it looks, sometimes. If you kill Plure, are you the hunters? Or are you the bear?”

Marden shook his head. “Will, that story doesn’t even make any sense.”

“Who said life has to make sense?” Will shot back. “It’s just something that happened. Whatever you want to take away from it is up to you.”

“Well, what do you get from it?”

Will considered for a moment. “Something really unexpected,” he said. He described what his father had said, and what he now thought it meant. “It was my father’s good-bye speech,” he said. “It wasn’t much of one, but it was the best one he could bring himself to give.”

The hours passed as Will and Marden talked. Will battled sleep, and eventually reached a point beyond tiredness, where he became more alert, and might not have been able to sleep if he’d tried. Later, they’d made some coffee and sat in silence, drinking it. Finally, Marden looked at the time.

“We’re there,” he said. “Unless the schedule has been thrown way off for some reason. Plure is being beamed to the starship that’ll take him back to Earth for his trial, or he will be soon.”

“Probably so,” Will agreed.

“I know what this was all about, Will. I know you just wanted to keep me talking so that I wouldn’t get my shot at Plure. I wanted my revenge, and you kept it from me.”

“I can’t apologize for that, Marden,” Will said. He felt different, somehow, after the long night and the unexpected revelations. Maybe it was just lack of sleep, but maybe it was something more. Maybe it had to do with a new kind of maturity making itself felt. He hoped that was it, in fact—he had wondered if he’d ever grow up, and now it seemed that he might after all.

“You don’t need to. I appreciate it. I’m mad as all hell—but I appreciate it anyway. You stopped me from making a fool of myself, from throwing away my career and maybe my life. More than that, though, you corrected my course even when I couldn’t. I’m not a vengeful person, I’m not a judge and a jury, and I’m damn sure no executioner. If I had let myself become those things, it would have been a terrible mistake.”