The apartment’s computer took over then. A sprinkler came on in the bedroom, extinguishing the fire, and a force field contained the worst of the heat there. The computer informed him that authorities had been notified, for the second time in two nights. This time, Kyle didn’t argue with it. He lay on the floor, bleeding and burned, until they arrived.

“You’re a lucky man, Mr. Riker.”

He sat up in the biobed and looked at the doctor, who was just putting away his dermal regenerator after having used it on Kyle’s burns. “Every time somebody tells me that, I’m lying in an infirmary somewhere,” Kyle said with a bitter grin. “I’m beginning to think luck isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

Dr. Trbovich smiled back at him. He was a kindly looking, slightly stout, avuncular fellow with a shock of white hair and an infectious grin. His blue coat was snug around the waist and ribs. “You had a bomb go off in your apartment. You didn’t suffer any broken bones. You had some cuts and burns, all of which were easy enough to fix up. You’ll be sore for a few days, probably, but you’re still here to complain about it. If you hadn’t woken up, you’d be much worse off than you are. I count that as pretty fortunate.”

“I suppose,” Kyle agreed, wincing at a stabbing pain in his ribs as he reached for his shirt. One of the emergency medical technicians who had brought him in had been kind enough to grab a fresh jumpsuit and a padd from his office for him, since his clothes had been torched in the fire and the pajamas he’d worn had needed to be cut from his body. “But more fortunate still are all those people who slept through the night without anyone trying to blow them up.”

“Well, yeah,” the doctor said. “I can’t disagree with that. You’ll be fine, though. You should rest here for another couple of hours, just so I can monitor your progress. Then you should take it easy for a few days. I’d like to see you again in a week so I can check your progress, okay?”

“Got it,” Kyle assured him. He pushed his hands through his sleeves and then sat on the biobed until the doctor left the room to go check on other patients.

What he hadn’t told the doctor was that, in the bomb’s aftermath and in the ambulance shuttle that brought him to Starfleet Command from his ruined apartment, his mind had been full of horrific images. Tholians, intense heat barely contained within their shielded suits, features completely hidden, bizarre sticklike weapons emitting fuzzy red rays that spread death and destruction everywhere. For a moment, in the shuttle, Kyle had been convinced that the medic sitting next to him would turn and reveal a red, crystalline face glowing with heat, and he’d felt about himself for a weapon he could use in his own defense. The moment had passed, though, and reason had returned.

Now, though, he didn’t think himself capable of simply sitting calmly in the infirmary. His mind was racing. The bomb, combined with all the other stressors of the past couple of days, had brought back the flashbacks. Kyle knew this was a danger signal. But it wasn’t something he wanted to talk about with a strange doctor, someone he didn’t know. Especially given the threat to his career from whatever trumped-up charges he might be facing on the starbase attack—if his credibility was to be questioned, the idea that he was seeing perfectly innocent medics as Tholian killers wouldn’t be advantageous.

He didn’t want to sit around the infirmary, and he couldn’t help thinking of himself as a target there anyway. A bomb had been transported into his apartment. Certainly, there were transporters in civilian hands, and in the hands of enemy alien races. But the majority of transporter technology in and around San Francisco belonged to Starfleet. Add to that the fact that the assassin who had visited his home the other night had been from Starfleet, and he had to be concerned about his safety, even right here in the middle of the Starfleet Headquarters complex.

Maybe especiallyhere.

With the friendly doctor examining another patient, Kyle finished dressing and hurried from the room. The hallways carried the same slightly sweet, antiseptic odor as infirmaries everywhere—and Kyle had been in enough over the past couple of years to become very accustomed to it. Doctors and nurses strolled through the hallways, talking and laughing, but there didn’t seem to be much sense of urgency. This time of night, Kyle figured, most people—with the exception of cases like his, of course—were either sound asleep at home or in their biobeds, and emergencies were rare.

He turned a corner, hoping to put more distance between himself and Dr. Trbovich, when he saw a familiar figure virtually blocking the entire hallway. The man was large, with broad shoulders and a muscular neck. Close-cropped, wiry hair clung to his head. He wore the gold uniform of engineering, and even from behind, Kyle could recognize Benjamin Sisko.

“Ben?” he asked, incredulous at seeing the man here. Ben Sisko had just graduated from the Academy a year ago. Ben was a protégé of Curzon Dax; the ambassador had introduced him to Kyle on the Livingstona few months back.

The man turned and, in fact, it was Ben Sisko, who wore an ensign’s single gold collar pip. But he looked terrible—his face drawn and sallow. If he hadn’t had rich brown skin, Kyle thought he’d have looked positively green.

“Mr. Riker,” Ben said. His voice sounded as shaky as Kyle’s legs felt. “What are you doing here?” He indicated a bandage over Kyle’s left eye. “Are you okay?”

“A little misunderstanding with an explosive device,” Kyle explained. “Nothing too serious. What about you? Aren’t you still posted to the Livingston?”

“Yes,” Ben said, tugging at his uniform collar. He flashed white teeth in a quick smile. “But they let me come back for this. Jennifer just had our baby.”

“You’re kidding,” Kyle said, sharing Ben’s grin. He put out a hand, which Ben enveloped with his own, and they shook hard. “Congratulations, Ben, that’s great!”

“Yeah,” Ben said. “It’s a boy. We’re calling him Jake.”

“That’s a fine name.”

“Thanks. I can’t sleep, though—Jennifer was in labor for almost twenty hours, and now she’s snoozing but I’m just too excited.”

“I don’t blame you a bit,” Kyle said.

Ben looked at the floor. “Do you—do you want to see him?” He spoke almost shyly, though with his deep voice the effect was a little odd.

Kyle realized that this was the first time since the bomb went off that he’d stopped thinking about his own problems, and was glad to continue that trend for a while longer. “Sure,” he said gladly. “I’d love to.”

Ben started down the hall. “They’re right in here,” he said, stopping at the door to a private room. He said “Open,” and the door obeyed. Inside, the room was mostly dark, with a soft glow coming from one light in a corner. Kyle followed Ben Sisko in.

Jennifer Sisko slept soundly in a comfortable bed, her baby snuggled up on her chest, wrapped in a blanket. All Kyle could see of the boy was a dark circle of a face, but he seemed to be a handsome baby—not that Kyle would have expected anything less than that from the union of Ben and Jennifer, as attractive a couple as one could hope for.

Ben’s face was in shadows as he stood with his back to the light, spine straight despite his exhaustion, and hands clasped behind his back, looking down at his wife and son, but in it Kyle could see a range of powerful feelings. Love, gratitude, relief, and respect,he thought. Then he remembered what Admiral Paris had told him, what seemed ages ago now. “What time was he born?”

Ben looked at a chronometer on the wall as if it had recorded the moment. “Twenty-three fifty-four,” he said.

“So, yesterday. Just. Congratulations, Ben. Your son was born on Father’s Day.”

Ben broke into a broad smile. “I guess you’re right.”