“I remember the case,” Owen said. “I just didn’t realize it was the same person. Of course, I didn’t know about the ‘warrant’ then, or I might have made the connection.”
“Almost no one knew, except for McNally,” Dugan explained. “He talked about it with a few people, including his immediate superior. But soon enough, Cook’s deterioration overshadowed any puzzle about a nonexistent warrant for a guy no one could find anyway. The mystery of the warrant went into the databanks and was largely forgotten, until you brought it up again today.”
“And the one man who claimed there was a warrant isn’t available to ask about it.”
“You could ask him,” Dugan corrected. “He’s here, in a private care facility in San Francisco. The thing of it is, you just wouldn’t get an answer.”
Ensign Tanguy Messina looked in on his charge several times a day. The poor guy had been Starfleet, just like he was, and even though he could no longer serve, he was still entitled to the respect due the uniform he had once worn. Now he didn’t wear a uniform at all, unless a loose white robe counted. They made sure he was comfortable, at least as far as one could determine the comfort level of a person who couldn’t tell you how he felt. Carson Cook could have stood outside in a blizzard, naked, and except for involuntary responses like shivering and turning blue, he’d have seemed every bit as content as he was inside this temperature-controlled environment with his every physical need catered to. The room was light and airy, the furniture soft and comfortable, and soothing music played in the background. Calming holoimages, rotating at random intervals, were displayed on the walls.
“People asking about you today, Cars,” Ensign Messina said casually. “That doesn’t happen too often anymore, does it? But today, everybody wants to know how you’re doing. Funny, huh?” He watched Carson closely, but there was no evidence that the guy understood a single word he was saying. As usual. He talked to the guy sometimes just because it felt weird not to. He was completely mindless, as far as Messina could tell, but he was still a human being.
“How you doing today?” he continued. “Same as always?”
Carson’s gaze flitted across him as if he wasn’t even there. It was strange, he knew. Modern medical science could cure just about anything, it seemed. He knew that historically, mental health care had been largely hit-and-miss. Some people could be put right again, others suffered forever, their conditions sometimes mitigated by drugs, talk therapy, electroshock, or other treatments. Messina had made a study of the dysfunctions of the mind, and he volunteered at this care facility, which had only the occasional “hopeless” case, where in centuries past it had been full to overflowing, while he worked on his medical training as a graduate student at the Academy.
He had glanced away from Carson, but when he looked back, it seemed as if something had changed. Maybe a little tensing of the muscles, which was rare. Carson sat in a chair most of the time; though he was capable of almost full mobility, he just didn’t seem to have anywhere he wanted to go. He was in that chair now, but he seemed a little more wound up than he had been just a moment before, almost coiled. And his eye movements were different. Rather than drifting aimlessly about the room, they seemed to dart.
This was definitely a change, Messina realized. He had to alert the director. Something was going on with Carson Cook, and that had never happened. He started for the door.
“Wait,” he heard.
He didn’t recognize Carson’s voice because Carson had never spoken, not in the whole time he’d been cared for here. But the room was otherwise empty; there was no one else it could have been. Messina turned around, and Carson was trying to get out of the chair. His muscles, atrophied by inactivity, didn’t seem to be cooperating. “I ... can’t ...” he muttered.
Messina rushed to help him. “Carson, hold on. Don’t push it,” he said. “Let me—”
As soon as he was close, Carson lunged from the chair, no atrophied muscles holding him back at all. He caught the unsuspecting Messina in a headlock, powerful arms encircling Messina’s throat. Messina tried to cry out an alarm but he couldn’t make a sound. He felt Carson’s arms shifting, and then his world turned black.
Carson dropped the red-shirted man on the floor, his neck snapped. That was not the man he wanted, he knew. That was just a man who was in his way. The man he wanted was in the city, though. Not far away. He would find that man, the one he wanted, and he would snap his neck too. Or do something else; he would decide when he found him. The means wasn’t important. It was the goal he cared about.
The man was in the city, at last, and the man had to die.
Chapter 32
“Ahead warp five,” Captain Pressman instructed.
“Ahead warp five,” Ensign Riker echoed. He touched the control panel and imagined he could feel the burst of speed, the g-forces pressing him into his seat, as the Pegasusaccelerated dramatically. It really was just his imagination. The g-force of a warp five acceleration would smear everyone on the bridge against the rear bulkhead if it could truly be felt, and those who were standing remained in place, just fine, even as the stars outside seemed to blur and stretch. He remembered a tidbit of old Earth history, at the advent of railroads; some people believed that trains would never work because at the speed they hurtled along nobody would be able to stand up.
After a few days of slow and steady progress into space, this was the first time they had traveled at warp, and Will couldn’t help being excited. Space travel had already begun to feel routine to him. He realized he wasn’t the most patient guy in the world, but he’d started to wonder when something would happen. Then, today, it had.
Captain Pressman had received a call that he’d taken in his ready room, and when he’d come back onto the bridge, his entire attitude had changed. He was brisk and efficient at the best of times, but now he was all business. “We’ve been sent on an emergency mission,” he said. “Go to yellow alert, full enable status.”
“Is there a threat, sir?” Marc Boylen asked.
“Not that we know of,” the captain answered. “Yet. But there will be.” He turned his attention to Will. “Set a course for Candelar IV, Mr. Riker.”
Will had relayed that instruction to the ship’s computer, which had set the course automatically. Then Captain Pressman had dictated the speed, and Will knew that this really was a matter of some urgency. Warp five was somewhere around a hundred times the speed of light, a concept that simply boggled Will’s mind when he really thought about it. Warp technology was a fact of life, and always had been. But the idea that he, a kid from Valdez, would be at the conn of a spacecraft traveling so fast that if he’d been watching it from Prince William Sound would have been gone before he could even see it, was hard to imagine.
And yet, here he was. Traveling at warp five to a destination he’d never even heard of, much less considered visiting. He wanted to know why they were headed to Candelar IV in such a rush, but he didn’t want to be the one to ask.
Finally, though, Commander Barry Chamish did. “What’s the emergency, Captain?” he wondered.
“It seems that Endyk Plure has been captured,” Pressman said simply.
“ TheEndyk Plure?” Marc Boylen asked. “Wanted for war crimes on at least a half dozen planets?”
“That’s the one, Mr. Boylen,” Pressman replied. “Hundreds of thousands dead, thanks to his predacity. At a bare minimum. On worlds throughout the Candelar system.”
“Sounds like a good thing to me,” Barry said.
“It is a very good thing,” Pressman agreed. “But the Federation wants him to stand trial in a Federation court. They want the trial to be fair and above reproach.”