Psi Phi's Star Trek Books Database

Deny Thy Father

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Star Trek: The Lost Era
Mass-Market Paperback / December, 2003
0-7434-6409-5

Written by Jeff Mariotte

Excerpt:

DENY THY FATHER

No Saturn. Will could scarcely believe the dumb luck. He'd already been tagged as a research assistant on a scientific project taking place there, and had been looking forward to it for months, and now it was gone, vapor through his fingers.

He figured the rest of his squadron had already gone home by the time he was released from Superintendent Vyrek's office, but he wasn't ready to face people he knew yet. Instead, he wandered alone across the Academy campus in the dying light. Boothby, the groundskeeper, looked at him with sad eyes and slowly shook his head, wispy white hair fluttering with the motion. So word is already out, Will thought. That didn't take long, did it? Helping himself to a seat on one of the benches stationed periodically along the paths, he watched the whirl of Academy life pass him by for a while. A cluster of cadets joked and laughed, Geordi La Forge--with his distinctive VISOR, everybody knew who Geordi was--at their center. Will knew that it was ridiculous to think he'd never be that happy again, but at this precise moment he had a hard time imagining any other fate.

He was still sitting on the bench, stewing in his own juices, as his father would have put it back in the days when they'd spoken to one another, when a first-year cadet named Arnis, a Trill female, sat down next to him. Though Arnis and Will had been friendly, they had not been especially close until both were picked for the Saturn team this coming summer. After that they'd spent a lot of time together, planning for the summer, studying the research project and the living conditions they'd face, and making guesses about their futures. She was an attractive young woman who kept her dark hair trimmed close, displaying the distinctive Trill spotting along her temples, cheeks and neck in all its glory. As she sat, she frowned at him. "I'm so sorry, Will."

"So you've already heard, too? Is there anyone on this campus who doesn't know yet?"

"It's pretty much all anyone's talking about," Arnis told him. "You guys--you and Omega Squadron--are just about famous."

"Infamous, maybe," Will countered.

"Either way, it seems like everyone knows your names. You'll be signing autographs before long."

"So all you have to do to make yourself well-known is to be escorted back to campus in the custody of Starfleet Security," Will said bitterly. "After having caused property damage and wasted enough seafood to feed a large family for a month."

"Maybe it's not something to message home about," Arnis said. "Although, in your case, I guess you don't do a whole lot of messaging home to begin with. But, you know, maybe it's better to be known than not known. In time, people might forget why they know your name, but they won't forget your name. It could be a good thing, in the long run."

Will shrugged. "Going to Saturn would have been a good thing in the short run," he said. "Tomorrow I'll learn what my replacement posting will be, but I doubt it'll be nearly as interesting as that would have been."

"Oh, I'm sure Saturn will be boring as anything," Arnis said. Then, with a laugh, she admitted, "Okay, it won't be. But I'll pretend it is, for your sake."

He tried to smile but had a feeling it wasn't coming off quite right. "Thanks," he said. "It's just--you know, sometimes it doesn't feel like anything ever works out for me here on Earth. I don't think I was meant to be here. My destiny is out there somewhere, among the stars. Down here I'm just too landlocked."

"Will, that's not true," Arnis said sorrowfully. "You've had a rough time, I guess. But you've also got an exemplary record here at the Academy. The way you whipped that Tholian ship in the battle sim? That may go down in Academy history just as much as your little fray does. Okay, you got a black spot today, but overall it's still a record to be proud of. When you graduate, you'll be assigned to a starship right away, with your record, and then you're on your way."

Will knew, intellectually, that Arnis was right. But he couldn't shake the cloud of pessimism that hung over him with the near-arrest, the loss of his summer plans, and now the mystery of whatever had become of his father. It wouldn't be the first time the old man had walked away from responsibility, but Kyle Riker took his job, if nothing else, seriously, so it was odd that they hadn't heard from him. "Thanks, Arnis," he said without notable enthusiasm. "You'll keep me posted, right? Let me know what Saturn's like?"

"Of course I will," she promised. She looked out at the sky, which had grown dark while they talked, and stood up. "Hey, I'm meeting some people in the mess hall. Do you want to come?"

"I'll just get something in my room," Will said. "Thanks anyway."

Arnis gave him a half-smile and retreated to join her other friends. Zeta Squadron had scattered after the superintendent's rebuke, and Will--not for the first time in his young life--found himself feeling utterly alone.

* * *

Kyle sat on his bunk, back up against the bulkhead and his padd balanced on his lap. It wasn't very comfortable, but he was learning that nothing about the Morning Star had been designed for the comfort of humans. But then, there were precious few humans on the ship to be inconvenienced. His new acquaintance, who called himself John Abbott, had been right about one thing--the human crewmembers Kyle had approached had all rebuffed his advances. They didn't want to be friendly, and Kyle wasn't about to push it. He kept reminding himself that he had chosen a freighter specifically so he wouldn't have a lot of people around.

Well, he thought, you got what you wanted. In spades.

Ever since leaving Earth, the Starbase 311 flashbacks had lessened in frequency and severity. For that, he was profoundly grateful. But after having spent several days in no company but his own, he had decided that the best thing to do was to confront those memories in an organized way.

Someone at Starfleet, he had no doubt, was trying to ruin him at the very least, and more likely to kill him as well as ruin his reputation. He had gone over, in his own mind, all the Starfleet-related jobs he had done for the past few years, and couldn't quite make the intuitive leap from any of those to his becoming a target. That left only Starbase 311 and the Tholian massacre that had taken place there. That was the wild card, the life event that seemed most likely to have brought him to the attention of his unseen enemy.

Had the whole attack on the Starbase been designed to kill him, he wondered? Was the only survivor of the assault really the target? Was someone now trying to finish the job left undone two years before? It seemed unlikely, but he had to consider every possibility. And to do that, he had to try to recall those details he had intentionally boxed away, forever, he had hoped. Somewhere in that incident the key to what was happening to him now might be buried, and if it was there he had to turn it up. So he scanned the records on his padd of his work there, and he worked on remembering.

The Tholian Assembly took the concept of territoriality to new heights. There were various theories espoused for this, but the fact was that Federation relations with the Tholians had always been marginal at best, and very little was known about their forbidding world--a Class Y planet incapable of sustaining human life--or their culture. Tholians were believed to have very short lifespans, possibly measured in months, although there was speculation that they passed on their consciousness in some kind of crystal memory formation from one generation to the next. Whatever the psychosocial reasons, though, they didn't tend to stray far from their own territory, and they didn't like it when others encroached. That was, in fact, a huge understatement--they defended their own territory with rabid determination. As a result, most other cultures tried to keep their distance lest they raise the ire of the Tholians.

Which, given the expansive nature of the Federation, was bound to happen someday. Starbase 311, a free-floating space station, was primarily a scientific field station, in the far outreaches of the Alpha Quadrant. While its stated purposes were science and research, the fact of the matter was that it was the closest Federation outpost to Tholian space and therefore of political and possibly military significance as well. If the Tholians would accept a starbase so near Tholian space, what else might they accept? Whole regions of the Alpha Quadrant were unexplored due to the Federation's unwillingness to test the Tholian comfort zone, so 311 was intended from the outset to be somewhat of a test case.

Because of its military potential, Kyle had been assigned to the starbase to examine the situation for himself. If the Tholians permitted the starbase to function unmolested, then there might be room for further expansion, and Kyle's role was to help arrive at that determination. If, on the other hand, the Tholians objected to 311's presence, Kyle would be on the scene to help strategize a Starfleet response. Either way, his strategic expertise was needed there, and he went where he was needed.

He was only there for a couple of months, as it turned out. A couple of months--but for everyone else on the starbase, their final months. Sitting on his bunk on the Kreel'n ship, he brought up the list of those who had served on Starbase 311 alongside him. Humans, Deltans, Rigelians, Andorians, Vulcans, Saurians... the sons and daughters of at least a dozen worlds had died that day. Looking at the names brought back flashes of memory. Li Tang, brilliant and sarcastic; Wulthrim, whose laughter could shake the starbase on its axis, Sul Sul Getreden, acerbic and humorless but with an unexpected poetic streak that showed through even on scientific reports. And so many more.

At the time, Kyle thought the Tholian attack had been prompted by the Berlin's visit, as if the Tholians, barely able to tolerate a starbase, had been set off by the unexpected arrival of a heavy cruiser, instead of the smaller Oberth-class ships usually used to supply the station.

Whatever had prompted the attack, it had come suddenly and without notice, almost as soon as the Berlin was too far away to return in time to help. Tholian warship activity in the sector was commonplace, as would be expected so close to their well-defended boundaries, so no one gave much thought to the approach of six ships until they crossed out of Tholian Assembly space and neared 311.

Kyle had been sleeping in his quarters when the Tholians had come close enough to raise alarms. He'd been called to the starbase's command center, and by the time the turbolift got him there a red alert had been issued. Klaxons blared, flashing red lights declared a state of emergency, and Starfleet officers ran to their battle stations. This was precisely why Kyle was stationed here.

But the assumption had been that any Tholian incursion would come after a breakdown in negotiations, or after some aggressive posturing on their part. None of their battle simulations had included a seemingly unprecipitated attack out of thin air. Starbase 311, being primarily science and research oriented, had shields and phaser banks and photon torpedoes, but that was the extent of their defensive systems.

When Kyle reached the command center, the first of the Tholian ships were heaving into view near the starbase. Powerful red lights from their ships shone brightly--Kyle's first thought was that they were already firing, but it turned out not to be weapons fire. He was never sure what it was--just illuminating their target, he guessed. But so much about the Tholians would remain a mystery to him. Whatever it was, when the first one appeared, Commander Bisbee, the ranking officer, looked at the red circle of light and said, "Looks like sunset over the Pacific."

"I don't like the sound of that," Kyle had rejoined. "Sounds too final."

Then the other ships pulled into position. Kyle had immediately started shouting suggestions to Bisbee, and Bisbee had instituted those as orders. Two Tholian ships were quickly knocked out of commission.

Two more, though, had started spinning an updated version of the famous Tholian web around the starbase. This web, instead of being a simple energy construct, had the additional effect of disrupting the station's electronic systems. A message had gone out to the Berlin as one of the very first acts when the Tholians approached, but no one was at all sure if it had been received or if further messages were going out. Then other systems began failing--shields, intra-base communications, environment, weapons. As the Tholians began constricting their web, the starbase was rocked violently back and forth, slamming occupants and equipment alike into walls and floors. Sparks flew and control consoles burst into flames, and Kyle saw an Ensign he knew cut in half by a computer bank ripped from its moorings and hurled into the young officer, crushing her against a bulkhead.

The two remaining Tholian ships pounded the starbase with phasers and plasma cannons. Kyle watched in horror as those around him died. Commander Bisbee was standing too close to a tactical systems control panel when it exploded, and a shard of tripolymer composite sliced through his carotid, fountaining blood across the room. The same explosion blinded Aikins, the security chief.

Starbase 311 was comprised of two main rings built around a central core, which held power generation facilities. Kyle had often thought of it as two rings on a single finger, with just a little space between them. The upper ring was operational, and included engineering, navigation, and tactical departments, while the lower ring was the province of the scientists and researchers for whom the station had been built. During the attack, when comm systems were coming in and going out seemingly at random, Kyle heard a few moments of absolute panic as the Tholian cannons focused on the lower ring. Someone--he had always thought it was Simon, though he could never be sure, had tried to take control of the situation, though it was already hopeless. "Take cover!" the frightened voice had commanded. "Get behind something and hold on! It'll be over in a few minutes!"

Other voices had screamed dissent, but the voice Kyle believed was Simon's had overruled them. "I'm telling you, your best chance is to move into--"

But then that part of the lower ring had been breached. For a second Kyle heard the screaming of metal and polymers, then a great whooshing sound, and then nothing at all. Everyone in that chamber had been sucked out into the vacuum of space.

And still the Tholians came. Kyle thought there might yet be a chance if they could focus the starbase's phaser arrays on the energy generators the Tholians used to create the web, but that would have required scanning the attacking ships to find those generators, and the scanners had all been knocked out of commission by the web. As had the phaser arrays, for that matter.

Even as he ticked through the possibilities in his head, Kyle realized that there was almost no one left alive to carry out any strategy he might create. Then the command center was rocked by a singularly powerful blast and Kyle's feet went out from under him. His head smashed against an ops console and then against something else--bulkhead or floor or ceiling, he had no idea. He saw a brilliant flash of light, then he saw nothing for an indeterminable period of time.

When he woke up, he tasted blood. He pushed himself to a sitting position and blinked his eyes open, spat blood onto the floor, fighting off a wave of nausea. Command was full of smoke; his lungs burned with it.

But at least he could sit up. Everyone else was dead.

On a flickering viewscreen he could see a Tholian ship, its red lights completely washing the starbase, so near that a tiny portion of the ship blocked the entire screen. He tried to ignore the frightening image as he stumbled from one corpse to the next, checking for pulses, listening for any faint breath. It was no good, though. Kyle's heart was the only one that still pounded: so loud he thought the Tholians would hear it from their ships. And he was in bad shape, himself--his left arm and shoulder had been crushed, his scalp lacerated. Burns covered much of his body, and he felt unbelievably thirsty. Something had torn open his right leg almost to the bone.

Giving up on the command center, he left it, limping into the hallways to see if there was anyone alive elsewhere on the ship. He had barely taken a dozen steps when he heard what was unmistakably a human voice. But it was raised in an inhuman scream. Kyle ran toward it, drawing a phaser pistol he'd strapped on at the first sign of trouble. As he rounded a corner, he saw Lieutenant Michaud on her knees, tears streaming down her face, and behind her, a Tholian pointing what looked like a crooked stick at her. But it was a crooked stick that spat death in the form of a searing red ray. While Kyle watched, helpless, Michaud's chest exploded, blood and gore spilling onto the floor even as she fell.

Kyle trained his phaser on the Tholian and squeezed the trigger. The Tholian was large, completely enclosed in a thermal suit that would enable it to survive in what must have been, to it, wretched cold. Its helmet was a faceted, crystalline mass of planes that Kyle couldn't even really focus on; it was like trying to pick out one plane of a diamond that was spinning in a centrifuge. But he held his phaser on it, and the creature buckled, emitting a terrible, screeching noise that Kyle thought would surely rupture his eardrums, and died. When its suit burst with an explosive boom it issued a blast of heat so powerful that Kyle could feel it, like a desert wind.

Another Tholian, alerted by the first one's death shriek, appeared at the other end of the hall and took aim at Kyle. But Kyle fired first, and this one fell too. To ease the spatial dissonance that could be caused by living inside a doughnut, the inner hallways of the rings had been constructed as short, straight segments with definite corners. Kyle approached the next corner with caution, and peeked around it, over the corpse of the Tholian he had just shot. His phaser was held in two hands, to steady it against his own shaking. The alien's internal heat, leaking out through the phaser hole in its suit, was already almost unbearable, and as soon as he had determined that the coast was clear Kyle hobbled, as fast as his broken body would carry him, to the next corner.

And that was when he knew he was doomed. A pack of them loomed at the far end, all bizarre looking and carrying those sinister sticks. Kyle stayed close to his corner and fired into the pack. He knew he hit several, but the red beams started shredding the wall that was his only protection, and after a moment he turned and ran. He couldn't get near the last corner he had passed--the Tholian was already so hot that the polymer bulkheads were melting around it. Instead, he slipped through a door that led to the central core, the "finger" of the space station.

He tried to run, but he was weakening. Behind him, he heard the Tholians following. He kept listening for voices: human voices, friendly ones, anything but the strident screeching of the Tholians, but he heard none. Instead of running, he took refuge in a Jefferies Tube, descending several levels and then tucking himself away, phaser at the ready, and waiting.

It seemed to take hours. He could hear the Tholians moving through the core, blasting through walls, knocking down doors, tearing open the tubes. Every now and then he thought he heard a non-Tholian voice, but each time he did it was screaming in agony, until he no longer wanted to hear them. He began to hope that everyone was already dead so their suffering would end. He began to wonder if he should finish himself, as well: if a phaser blast to the head would be less painful than sitting and waiting and finally succumbing to one of those sticks.

But he couldn't bring himself to do it. He was Kyle Riker, a survivor from way back, from a long line of survivors. His great-great-grandfather, the stories went, had led the residents of a small Wyoming town safely through the grim days of World War III, fighting off the marauding bands of refugees that had combed the nation's wild places in those days, as well as the radiation poisoning that had killed millions. The town had lost two residents, both to exposure during a particularly long, cold winter, but otherwise they had all made it through the worst days. Eventually, of course, Jamie Riker had died of old age, and many of those under his protection had gone as well, of natural causes, mostly. But the legend lived on--a Riker had persevered and kept his town alive when the rest of the world was going mad. Kyle already had failed to live up to that example, though--if the starbase was his town, he had utterly missed the mark.

Even so, he was unable to just give up. It wasn't in his nature.

And finally, they found him again. They breached the tube twenty meters from him, and he started firing as soon as the first Tholian showed his ugly crystalline facemask. At the same time, he tried to stand, to run again, but his injured muscles had frozen up, locked him in place. Stuck where he was, in a half-crouch, he tried to raise his phaser again, but it was so heavy, so heavy....

Just as the red beam from a Tholian stick weapon struck him, he stumbled and fell flat, the beam slicing across his back as he landed facedown on the surface of the Jefferies tube.

Copyright © 2003 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.