The others expressed their assent, so finally Dennis, cheeks crimsoning until they almost matched Boon’s, accepted. “Okay,” he said enthusiastically. “I’ll do it. With all of us working together, I think this one will be a breeze.”

I wouldn’t be so sure,Will thought, thinking about stories he’d heard of past years. There seemed to be a lot that could go wrong with these missions. He wasn’t going to say anything that might undermine Dennis’s confidence, though. Especially since he was the one who had put Dennis’s abilities on the line by nominating him.

But I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

Chapter 3

He knows. Kyle Riker knows now that he is a target. In some ways, that will make the rest of it easier. So far, we’ve had to operate in absolute secrecy, to make our moves slowly and quietly, keeping everything under wraps until the timing was right. But now, everything can be done in the open. Riker can be made to suffer—has to be made to suffer—as others have suffered on his account.

And now that he knows, the real joy can begin. Watching Riker fall apart—watching him withdraw from everyone and everything, watching him desperately trying to protect himself from unknown dangers, will be the greatest pleasure we have known.

But what if he—?

He won’t. He can’t. He can only react, becoming more and more fearful and uncertain, until we allow him to die.

To die. We do like the sound of that.

Yes, we do.

Engineer Lars Gunnarson was sleepy. He knew, of course, what his shift was, and that it required him to work during the night when most of the people he knew were sleeping. But knowing it didn’t make sleeping during the day a whole lot easier. There was light outside, and noise, and things going on that he wanted to be part of. So he got what sleep he could, and often came to work more tired than he should have.

But,he rationalized, it’s not like the transporter is often used during my shift anyway. I have to keep it maintained and running, and on those rare occasions when it’s needed I have to operate it.He thought he could live up to those requirements on an abbreviated sleeping schedule, at least until he rotated back to days, which he greatly preferred. And he was glad that he was here on Earth, at Starfleet Command, instead of out on a starship, where who knew what kinds of demands might be made of him.

But he had received one reprimand for dozing off on the job. Another would get him booted down a rank and lose him this assignment, which came with a certain amount of autonomy that he enjoyed. So he struggled to stay awake and aware, just in case. He was doing that, on this occasion, by poring over a manual for impulse engines, which he had not yet had the dubious pleasure of working on. The material was dense and, obviously, quite technical, and when he heard footsteps just outside the transporter room, he was in the middle of a very difficult paragraph. When the door whooshed open, he still hadn’t made it to the end, and he was trying to grasp the concepts firmly in his mind. “Be right with you,” he said, battling to maintain his focus on the page.

Suddenly the thought that whoever had entered might be an officer swept into his head, and he began to turn, ready to offer a salute and an apology if necessary. But he had barely begun to spin around when he caught a flash of a red uniform sleeve coming toward him. He tried to raise a hand to dodge but he was too late. An impact, a bright flash of light, and then Lars Gunnarson’s world went dark.

Sleep, in the weeks and months after the attack on Starbase 311, had been a virtual stranger to Kyle Riker. When exhaustion finally overtook him and he succumbed, dreams almost invariably followed—nightmares that left him thrashing about and screaming, waking up in a bed drenched in cold sweat, heart hammering, throat dry. Then another extended period of wakefulness would occur, when closing his eyes and drifting off seemed almost as terrifying as being back on the starbase during the assault. Finally, the cycle would repeat; sleep would come, and with it the dreams.

Under the skillful care of Kate Pulaski, his physical injuries were healed, bones knitted, internal organs mended on a cellular level. Meters of damaged veins had been replaced by synthetic ones, and one ruined kidney was removed, with an artificial one substituted in its place. The body, Kate had explained, is basically a complex machine, and machines can be fixed. Sometimes they were better than they had been, when all their parts were strictly organic.

But the mind, she had said, is a different story altogether. Certainly there were specific physical repairs that could be made to the brain, but there were limits to what those could accomplish. And Kyle fought against some of those. Memories of the most terrible parts of the Tholian attack, for instance, could have been wiped from his memory by careful surgical manipulation of his brain. Kyle had refused. He was a military strategist, and the lessons learned from the Tholian attack—and the disastrous, limited defense—on Starbase 311, were not lessons he wanted to forget. He would, he insisted, learn to live with the memories, but he would not lose them.

And he was right. It took time, and a hellish amount of hard work, with Kate and a whole team of counselors and therapists, but he eventually made a kind of peace with his own inner turmoil and as he did, the bad dreams became more and more rare. He learned, once again, to welcome sleep, to accept it as a refuge from the demands of the day, and to consider dreams a kind of nightly vacation from real life and concerns. Some nights, still, it was harder to achieve sleep than others, and some nights the nightmares returned. But they were unusual, now, and not the norm.

This night, because of the stresses of the day, Kyle had suspected that it might be hard to let go and allow sleep to come, and he’d been correct. But it had come, finally, and he had slipped into a solid slumber, without dreams. When he heard the familiar hum of a transporter beam, he thought at first that it was a dream. He was groggy and thickheaded, and he tried to just roll over in his bed, away from the sound.

But his eyes flickered open as he did, and he saw the glow reflected on the wall near his bed. Instantly awake, he shot up and looked toward where the beam was just fading away, expecting to see another attacker coming at him. The room was empty, though. Maybe it had just been a dream, after all. He blinked a couple of times, trying to see through the darkness of the beam’s aftermath.

Not empty, after all. Where the beam had been, there was something on the floor. He couldn’t make out the details, in the dark room, but what he could see was a low, flat disk, just a little smaller than the holographic target in a game of velocity. Unlike a velocity disk, though, this one wasn’t floating through the air, but sitting on his floor with solidity and some kind of purpose.

What purpose it might have struck Kyle, and he leapt from the bed, running for the open door of his bedroom. Beyond the door was a short hallway, with a bathroom and a room that he used as an office, and then leading into his large living room. He had just cleared the bathroom door, heading for the living room, calling out to the apartment’s computer, when the bomb went off.

The first thing Kyle noticed was a flash of light and his own shadow cast before him, stark and hard-edged against the suddenly bright room ahead. The flash was succeeded simultaneously by a deafening roar and a shock wave that lifted him off the floor and hurled him against the living room’s far wall. He slammed into it hard, just about where his shadow had been, trying to turn to hit it shoulder-first but without enough time. Instead, his left arm and the left side of his face made contact, and then he fell off the wall and onto the floor. Finally, a wave of searing heat struck him, burning his right side.