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“Maybe so,” De
Estresor Fil still couldn’t meet his eyes. “Yes,” she admitted after a long moment. “All of you—humans, I mean—looked sort of fu
“If you could come up with a certain answer to that one,” De
“I feel ... shy ... about telling you who it is,” Estresor Fil said, almost in a whisper.
De
“But I want to talk to someone, De
“And you think I’ll be able to do that?” he asked.
“Possibly. But I find myself oddly embarrassed.”
De
She took a deep breath, which he found a very human thing to do, and let it out slowly. “Very well. I find myself quite taken with Felicia Mendoza. Do you think that she would ever return my interest, De
Felicia?De
He could feel her gaze on him, and now he couldn’t bring himself to meet it. “Am I just being foolish, De
“I ... I really don’t know, Estresor Fil.” That was the truth, at least. “I don’t know what Felicia is looking for, that way, or who. If anyone. I’ve never really discussed it with her.”
“So there’s a chance?” Now her voice sounded hopeful, and he didn’t want to be responsible for dashing that hope.
“A chance? Of course there is,” he promised her. “There’s always a chance.” I think.
Riker?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
But the search continues?
Of course it does.
Friends, family, interviewed? All known prior whereabouts examined?
Except Starbase 311, of course.
Of course.
Otherwise, yes. The son, Will Riker, knows nothing. Neither does the woman.
Pulaski? The doctor?
That’s right. She hasn’t heard from him. She’s not happy about it. They were together only a brief while. He seems to have hurt her badly.
No surprise. It’s the kind of man he is. Cold, unfeeling.
It was hard to tell if she was angrier about the fact that he vanished without telling her, or about the fact that she was being asked about him.
She’s a good doctor? This Pulaski?
One of our best.
Then let her live.
Are you sure? He might still have some feelings for her.
Her punishment, for caring about Riker, will come when she learns of his death.
Fitting.
It’s all fitting. That’s the point. It isn’t truly justice if it doesn’t fit the crime.
That’s all I want. Justice.
That’s all any of us want. Justice. And Riker’s head in a box.
Chapter 17
“The land here is as God-forsaken as ever a man has set eyes upon. It is swampe, most of it, with almost no solid erth to walk on. With every step your boots sink deeper into the muck and fill with brackish water. The swampe stinks and is ful of bugs and even gaters which can bite a man before he sees it coming. Fore the last three days and nights I have never been dry but always wet and misirabel. Priv. Rector pulled a leech from my neck, afternoon yesterday, and then found four on his own legs, under his trous., drinking his blood. We are only days from Sava
“Its a good thing the taste of our victories in Atlanta and since still remain in our mouths, and the cheers of the slaves who follow us from place to place, to drive us on through this because in a long and hard campaign I cant remember the boys ever beeing so unhappy and fed up. We know what we do is importent and Gen. Wm. Sherman, or Uncle Billy as the boys call him, keeps telling us so. I just keep going, try not to complane, and some of the boys have started calling me Old Iron Boots because they say nothing can stop me from taking the next step. Maybe they are right. Anyhow I guess its all a man can do is to keep marching. We havent seen a Joh
Will closed the old book and carefully set it down on his desk. He’d meant to just skim through it, but he found that the stories Thaddius Riker told—despite his rather primitive literary skills—were fascinating. Riker had accompanied Major General William Tecumseh Sherman on his long fight to Atlanta, and at this point in the tale, they had moved on after putting that city to the torch, headed for Sava
Sherman, it was said, had coined the phrase “War is hell,” and Old Iron Boots Riker’s diary seemed to confirm that assessment. An earlier entry, about a friend of Thaddius’s whose arm had been amputated in a field hospital by a drunken surgeon using a dull, rusted bayonet, had been as good a description of hell as any Will ever hoped to read. Will’s ancestor had indeed been through hell, but he had survived it.
Anyway, reading the diary had helped to take Will out of his own life and concerns, which was good because otherwise he’d have been thinking of nothing but Felicia day and night. There was nothing wrong with thinking about Felicia, he resolved, but there had to be limits, even to that. He wasn’t opposed to having a social life, even a romantic one, but he was at the Academy to do a job, to prepare himself for service to Starfleet, and even Felicia Mendoza had to take second place to that.
Will found the diary hard to read: its brittle pages flaked and chipped as he turned them, and Thaddius Riker’s handwriting was cramped and spidery. Sometimes blotches of water, ink, or something that Will thought might be blood obscured words or even whole sections. But even so, no matter where he dipped in, he found himself lost in his ancestor’s exploits, and only occasional mental images of Felicia’s radiant smile or the way her strong body filled out her Academy uniform could haul him back to the twenty-fourth century. For the past couple of days he had been turning to the diary as often as he could make the time, in between classes, other work, and little bits of social time.