The Coridanian looked stricken then. Will, always curious about Estresor Fil’s ways and motivations, wondered if she was really just being blunt, or if she had intentionally tried to wound him, hoping, perhaps, that it would inspire him to greater effort. And less whining,he thought, that would be good too.Boon fancied himself a great leader and a starship captain in the making, but Will figured that any captain who bitched and moaned as much as Boon did would be begging for mutiny, probably within the first few days of his command.
He had to admit that while the complaining was annoying, Boon really did have a lot of good qualities—he was smart, made decisions fast and well, could think on his feet, and could inspire the loyalty of those around him. Until the sour attitude took over, and then all that loyalty was gone. Perhaps if Boon had been chosen as the leader of this final project, he’d have stowed the negativity and would already be leading them toward their objective. Dennis, obviously worn out from his ordeal so far, wasn’t exactly taking the helm and inspiring confidence, so maybe Boon would have been the better choice. But Will didn’t want to let Dennis’s chance at leadership vanish. He decided to spur his friend on. “Do you have any ideas, Dennis? You’ve had the clue the longest.”
Dennis, sitting on the ground in the doorway headquarters, shook his head sadly. “I tried to come up with something, but at the same time I was trying to figure out how to get off the island. I thought that should take precedence, since if I couldn’t do that none of you would get a shot at the clue either. So I didn’t really make much progress, I’m afraid.”
“Are you sure there’s not more to it?” Boon asked. “How do we find the right pair of twins in a city this size? Must be crawling with twins.”
Felicia flashed her smile again, the one that Will was finding more intriguing all the time. “Maybe it’s not human twins,” she suggested. “There are maps every few blocks. If the twins are a natural feature, or one of the main city attractions, they’ll be on there.”
“Worth a look, anyway,” Dennis agreed. He forced himself wearily to his feet. “You guys have been waiting around here for long enough as it is. Let’s find us one of those maps and see if we can locate some twins.”
A kiosk three blocks down Jones Street had city maps and transport schedules for the whole region. When Dennis entered “twins” on the keypad, nothing came up. But when Estresor Fil called up a city overview, the twins were suddenly apparent to all. Twin Peaks were two round-topped, still undeveloped hills—two of the tallest points in the city, it turned out, even higher than Nob Hill. Will requested a history of them, in case it would help identify where at the feet of the twins they might expect to find the checkpoint, and learned that one of the hills—there were actually more than two, all in the same vicinity, though the two called Twin Peaks were the tallest—had once held a broadcasting tower from which signals could be sent through the air to homes all over the San Francisco Bay Area, and that on clear days the view from the Peaks was considered one of the best in the region. None of which helped a bit when it came to locating their checkpoint.
They had all done enough walking, except for Estresor Fil, who had been standing more or less in one place for hours now. But majority ruled and they hopped an underground transport to the Twin Peaks area. They would have, Will suspected, plenty of walking ahead of them yet, especially if they had to circumnavigate the base of the hills in order to find the spot they needed.
He, for one, was more than happy to sit down for a while.
As the map had indicated, the burnished brown hillsides of Twin Peaks were undeveloped, left open for hikers and view seekers to enjoy, Estresor Fil’s opinion on the latter notwithstanding. But the city came right up to its edge, with houses and commercial buildings hemming it in on all sides. In many spots, the members of Zeta Squadron couldn’t even see where the hillside began because it was behind private homes, with no access to the public. They had to try to peer over fences and between narrowly spaced houses to see if they could locate anything that might be their checkpoint.
After making a complete circuit, they still had no idea what they were looking for. “Maybe we interpreted the clue wrong,” Dennis said glumly. He had stopped walking and just stood on the sidewalk, holding his envelope between two fingers like it had become something unpleasant. “Maybe these are the wrong twins.”
“Yeah, and maybe this is a stupid project,” Boon added. “I mean, if we really were an away team in hostile territory, we wouldn’t have checkpoints to look for, would we?”
“Probably not,” Will agreed. “But we would have a mission of some kind. We’d be gathering information about the place, or we’d be trying to locate a contact, or something. We wouldn’t just land someplace for no reason at all.”
“Will’s right,” Felicia said. “So is Dennis—it’s possible that we picked the wrong twins. But the assignment is as close to realistic as it can be, without risking whole classes of cadets by sending them to actual hostile cities.”
“I guess,” Boon said reluctantly.
“Perhaps we’ve been too literal about the clue,” Estresor Fil suggested. “Maybe it means something other than the foot of the hills. Is there a cobbler or something like that nearby?”
Will considered this for a moment. She was right—it was unlikely that Admiral Paris wouldn’t have worked in a twist or two. So they had to look for the less likely possibilities, even the opposite of what appeared to be the meaning. “Maybe we should be looking up,” he announced.
“Up?” Boon repeated. “You’re not making any sense, Riker.”
“Not at first glance,” Will agreed. “But ‘feet’ has multiple meanings, and one of them is as a unit of measurement. Once used, among other things, to indicate altitude.”
“Good point, Will,” Felicia said, touching his upper arm for emphasis. “I agree. We should go up.”
Boon shrugged. “I guess we can’t do any worse than we are down here. Except for the climbing part, I mean.”
They split into two teams, Will and Felicia taking one hill, and Dennis, Boon and Estresor Fil on the other. As they climbed, the late afternoon sun bore down on them. Up here there was only stunted shrubbery, and nothing to shade them from its rays. Will commented on it, and Felicia just laughed at him. “This is nothing compared to summers at home,” she said. “We have heat, humidity, bugs—this is like paradise, here.”
“Climate-controlled paradise,” Will reminded her. “Nothing like this in Alaska, I can tell you.”
“We have cold, too, in the mountains,” Felicia said. “But maybe not like in Alaska.”
“Maybe not,” Will agreed. He picked his way up a faint trail, sidestepping the low brush as he rose. “Valdez is in the southern part of the state, well below the Arctic Circle, and it’s pretty nice this time of year. Buggy, too. Come winter, though, it’s a different story. The sun comes up around ten in the morning and has set by five in the afternoon. In between, it never warms up. There’s snow everywhere—you don’t see the ground until the spring thaw, and then everything that was snow is mud.”
“It doesn’t sound like you miss it much,” she said.
“I love it,” Will told her. “But I couldn’t wait to get away from it. Now that I’m here, I can’t wait to get off the planet.”
She shielded her eyes against the sun and looked across the way at the group climbing the other hill. “We’re ahead,” she said happily. “Maybe this summer—what are you doing for the summer?”
Will nodded eagerly. “I’ve already got my assignment,” he said. “I’m going to Saturn. I’m so anxious to get going I could explode.”
“That’s great, Will,” Felicia enthused. “You didn’t get off-planet last summer, did you?” she asked him.
“Just for a couple of weeks, to New Berlin. But I spent most of the summer in Paris. I’m due for some time off-world, that’s for sure.”