“There are several public shelters,” Estresor Fil pointed out. “That we can find afterwe eat.”
Dennis laughed, getting the point. “Okay, let’s go feed ourselves,” he said, starting back toward the city itself. Everyone else followed.
“I think we should avoid the public shelters, though,” Will suggested. “The other squadrons might be there.”
“So?”
“So you really think they won’t try to sabotage us if they see us?”
“We could do the same to them,” Boon offered.
“I’d rather try to win fairly,” Felicia put in. “Without doing anything to hurt anyone else’s chances, just by being the best.”
Boon pretended to stifle a yawn. “That’s no fun, Felicia.”
She shot him an angry glare. “You may not think so, Boon. But it’s the way I’d like to play it, and I think it’s the way Admiral Paris wants it. If you don’t think so, maybe you should reconsider a Starfleet career.”
Boon stopped in the middle of the street, pulling himself up to his considerable height, and loomed over Felicia. “Don’t be so sure of yourself,” he said, his voice low and rumbling. Will wondered if he should intercede, but then decided that if Boon moved from menacing to actual violence, Felicia would be able to handle him. “Sure, they talk about fair play and honor and integrity and all that stuff, but you think they really mean it? When the chips are down and it’s them or you, you’d better do whatever is necessary to make sure you walk away and they don’t.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Dennis said. “Starfleet doesn’t just talk about integrity; they personify it.”
“They’re right, Boon,” Will said. “If you don’t think so, you don’t know much about Starfleet’s history.”
Boon shook his head, scoffing at the others. “Some people are so naïve,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, when I’m sitting in that captain’s chair, I hope I don’t have any dreamers like you all on my crew to worry about.”
“With an attitude like that,” Will replied, “I don’t think you’ll ever have to worry about being in the captain’s chair at all.” He was surprised that this side of Boon had never emerged before. But then, he hadn’t know the Coridanian that long, just during this school year. And none of their group projects had forced them to spend as much time together as this one would. Any personality conflicts that were simmering beneath the surface would surely come out during the week’s forced intimacy.
Boon leaned forward threateningly and Will braced himself, believing that the Coridanian was going to attack him instead of Felicia. Boon had height and reach on him, Will knew, and if it was going to be a fight it would be a brutal one that he would either win quickly or not at all.
Before either male could surrender to the testosterone that fueled them, however, Estresor Fil inserted her tiny form between them. “I need to eat,” she implored. “Now.”
Will held Boon’s yellow eyes for a few more seconds, then ticked his head toward the diminutive Zimonian. “She’s right,” he said. “We need to get her fed—all of us, really—and we need to stick together. You willing to do that?”
Boon breathed heavily, but Will could see his body relax, his fists unclench. “Yeah, okay,” he said, sounding a bit reluctant to call off the fight. Will had the sense that their reckoning was merely postponed, not canceled.
With the tension dissipated, though not eliminated, they turned once again to the question of food. Finding some was not difficult—no one went hungry in San Francisco—and they ate at an outdoor table. Boon and Will sat at opposite ends, but the group kept the conversation away from the recent incident between them. Dennis steered it back toward the question of lodging for the night.
“If we’re going to avoid public shelters,” he said, with a furtive glance toward Boon, “then we’re going to have to come up with some alternative. I don’t want to spend the night on the streets, and we can’t go back to our rooms at the Academy.”
“Let’s approach it as if we really were on a mission,” Will suggested. “We’d want to stay someplace discreet, where the local authorities wouldn’t notice us. We wouldn’t want to interact much with the locals, if we could help it, until we had the lay of the land better. Since we spent most of today trying to meet up and then climbing mountains, we didn’t really get to do that.”
“I know a place,” Felicia offered.
“Where?” Dennis asked her. “I hope it doesn’t involve any more climbing.”
“Remember that doorway that Estresor Fil found this morning? No one went in or out. The windows were all blacked over. I think it’s an empty space, and obviously it’s not getting much use, if any.”
“You want to break in?” Dennis asked, surprised.
“Exactly. We don’t have to hurt anything. We just go in, sleep, and leave in the morning.”
“That’s illegal,” Estresor Fil pointed out.
“So?” Boon asked, the first word he’d said since he and Will had faced off on the street. “Like she said, we wouldn’t hurt anything. If we were on an away mission in hostile territory, we wouldn’t hesitate to break a few minor laws to save our own skins.”
“I suppose,” Estresor Fil said, more loquacious now that her stomach was full. “Although I don’t feel very comfortable with the idea. Weren’t we specifically forbidden from breaking laws?”
“There are laws and there are laws,” Boon argued. “In San Francisco, anyone who doesn’t have a place to sleep is entitled to go to one of the public shelters. That’s why they have them. But if we don’t want to do that—and if we were on a secret mission here, that would be the last place we’d want to show up—then we have to bunk someplace else. We don’t want to stay in a tourist hotel, again since we’re supposed to be here secretly. Either we make friends with one of the locals, in a hurry, or we go with Felicia’s idea.”
“We don’t seem to have a lot of options,” Will agreed. “And it does seem like if you’re trying to hide from the authorities, going to a shelter run by those same authorities is a bad idea.”
“It’s hard to argue with that,” Dennis admitted. “I still don’t think I like the idea, but—”
“You got any better ones?” Boon interrupted.
“That’s precisely the problem,” Estresor Fil put in, having apparently been won over. “Either we don’t break any of Admiral Paris’s rules but we do the single thing that would most likely result in our capture, or we break rules judiciously and carry out our assignment.”
When she finished, all eyes went to Dennis.
“I don’t like it,” he said at last. “But since I can’t, in fact, think of anything better, I agree that it seems like the best of our limited options.”
By the time they’d finished their dinner, the sky had gone dark.
They caught an underground transport back to Nob Hill, checking the route maps to see if there were any obvious clues to an artist who spanned the globe. There weren’t, so they continued back to the corner at which they’d met earlier that day, and with which Will and Estresor Fil had become so familiar. At the doorway alcove, Boon took the lead in the breaking-and-entering process. He said he’d done it several times, at home on the hardrock mining planet of Coridan.
“Security might be a little better here,” Dennis suggested in a nervous whisper.
“Are you calling Coridan some kind of primitive backwater?” Boon demanded.
“No, not at all,” Dennis said quickly, backing away a step as if Boon’s words had carried physical force.
“Look, Boon,” Will said, stepping up and forgetting his earlier resolve. “I don’t know if your problem is that we elected Dennis to lead the squadron on this mission, or what. But you’re acting like someone with a chip on his shoulder the size of the moon. If you can’t leave your personal feelings behind and carry on with the mission, then you should just tell us now so we can report back to Admiral Paris that we failed.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Riker?” Boon asked with a snarl. “You sabotage everything you ever do, guaranteeing you’ll never succeed at anything so you won’t really be tested. You’d just love to shoot a hole in this project right off the bat.”