“They don’t believe he’ll get a fair trial there?” Shinnareth Bestor asked from ops.
“They don’t believe he’ll live to see his trial date,” Pressman said. “He’s being held at the most secure facility on Candelar IV. But there are already mobs surrounding the prison, calling for his head. It’s positively medieval, apparently. The locals are desperate for someone to get Plure off the planet and into Federation custody as quickly as possible. We’re the nearest Starfleet ship, so we’re elected.”
“Which will make us very unpopular when we arrive,” Marc observed. “Hence the yellow alert.”
“That’s correct,” Pressman noted. “If they get wind of our approach, the Candelarans may even try to intercept us. Not the authorities, but the citizens.”
Will felt an unfamiliar tension squeeze his gut at this discussion. He had wanted to do something—anything. He hadn’t wanted to simply cruise around space without apparent purpose—“exploring” for the sake of exploration. Now they had a purpose, a mission, and it sounded like a dangerous one. There was an element of excitement to it all, but also a nagging fear. His life had been in danger before—certainly when he’d followed Paul Rice onto Saturn’s moon, it had. But he hadn’t had a lot of time to think about it then. This time, he was in control of the ship, intentionally flying them right toward certain trouble.
He smiled, though he tried to hide it from the rest of the bridge crew. This is it,he thought. This is what I signed on for.
“Mr. Riker,” Captain Pressman said sharply. “My office. Mr. Chamish, you have the bridge.”
“Aye, sir,” Barry said.
Will gulped and followed the captain to his ready room, just off the bridge. He wondered if he’d done something wrong. He couldn’t imagine what. He’d brought the ship into orbit around Candelar IV, outside visual range from the surface, as instructed. They had made good time and arrived without incident.
When he entered the ready room, Captain Pressman was already sitting down behind a large desk. The door shut as soon as he walked through. This was the first time Will had seen inside it. The walls were a warm beige, set off by a cool blue carpet. Over the captain’s right shoulder was a large window, through which Will could see Candelar IV’s ocher sphere. Directly behind him was a shelf on which stood a small bronze sculpture that Will recognized as a Frederic Remington bronze, an old-fashioned Earth cowboy trying to hang on to a horse that reared up to avoid the strike of a rattlesnake. As if to demonstrate that he was not entirely old-fashioned, Pressman had put a model of an Ambassador-class starship on the shelf next to his Remington bronze.
“Sir?” Will asked, standing at attention.
Pressman fixed him with an unwavering gaze. “Nice flying, son,” he said. “I know it wasn’t particularly difficult, but you did what you were told to do without asking a lot of questions, and you got us here. Now we just have to get Plure off the planet and get out of here again.”
“Yes, sir,” Will said.
“At ease, Will,” Pressman said. “You prefer Will, correct? Not William? That’s what your file said.”
“That’s what I’m used to, sir,” Will answered, relaxing his stance a little.
“I make snap judgments about people, Will,” Pressman said. “Sometimes I’m told that I shouldn’t. That it’s a bad thing, a dangerous thing. Trouble is, more often than not, I’m right. My judgments are borne out in practice. So I keep doing it.”
“If it works for you, sir, I don’t see the problem.”
“There it is, Will, in a nutshell. It works for me. And I have to say, my judgment about you has been formed from precious little evidence. You’ve sat on my bridge for a few days, you’ve flown my ship, and you haven’t said much. The few times you have opened your mouth have been to ask intelligent questions or to offer opinions, most of which make sense to me. I’ve read your file, of course, and I know you had some rough times at the Academy, but I also know that you graduated near the top of your class and were quite an accomplished cadet.”
“I did my best, sir.”
“I’m sure you did. So here it is, Ensign Riker. I’m sending an away team to the planet to pick up Endyk Plure. I want you to be part of that team.”
“Me, sir?” Will asked, realizing even as the words passed his lips how stupid it sounded. The captain hadn’t been talking to anyone else.
“You, Will. I have a good feeling about you. I think you’ll prove to be a smart, capable Starfleet officer, destined for accomplishment. I don’t know what it’ll take to turn you from a raw rookie helm jockey into the kind of officer I think you can be, but my guess is that you need experience. Lots of different kinds of experience. An away mission like this one is something that doesn’t come along all that often, so I want you to be part of it. The way I see it, if you’re going to start collecting experience, there’s no time like the present, right?”
“I suppose that’s true, sir.”
“Do you see the statue behind me, Will? The cowboy?”
Will didn’t know how anyone could miss it. “Yes, sir.”
“The popular myth is that cowboys were loners. The rugged individual. Do you know what that is, Will?”
He didn’t know what the captain meant, precisely. “No, sir.”
“It’s a load of hooey,” Pressman declared. “Maybe they were, to some extent, in the sense that it was hard for a cowboy to marry and settle down, since he was out on the range for several months of the year, going off on six-month long cattle drives and the like. But the fact is, every cowboy worked as part of a team. They worked for a ranch. One cowboy can’t control a herd of cattle, or string an entire fence, or do much of anything else by himself. Cowboys were team players, and they all had to pull their weight. That’s why I keep that statue behind me—to remind everyone who stands where you are that we’re all part of a team here.”
“Makes sense, sir.”
“And the ship next to it, in case you’re wondering, is the Zhukov.First vessel I served on. Captain D’Emilio is the one who taught me the value of team play. We’re all in this together, is what he used to say. The two statues pretty much sum up my philosophy of command.”
“I see, sir.”
“Not yet, you don’t,” Pressman argued. “But you will. And you’ll start the process today, when you go down to Candelar IV. Be careful down there—when you get back, you’ll need to get us out of here fast.”
Will beamed down to the prison on Candelar IV with a trio from security: Florence Williams, Marden Zaffos, and the chief, Lt. Teilhard Aronson. Hendry Luwadis, the director of the prison, was waiting for them anxiously, and practically wept with relief when they materialized in his office.
“What took you so long?” he wanted to know.
“We came as quickly as we could,” Lt. Aronson assured him. “We were the nearest Starfleet ship, but we were still quite a distance away.”
“When we joined the Federation,” Luwadis said, “I thought we’d be better served by our membership. But this ... leaving us with this killer on our hands ...”
“Sir, we’re here to take him off your hands.” Lt. Aronson spoke with a soothing tone, but Luwadis was not easily soothed.
Glancing at the surroundings, Will began to understand his problem. This was not a highly developed world. Advanced enough to qualify for Federation membership, but probably just barely. The structure they were in, the main prison administration building, was made of stone. The office was full of uniformed, armed guards, but their weapons looked relatively primitive compared to the phaser rifle in Will’s hands. Even Luwadis’s clothing, a coppery suit a few shades darker than his skin, looked rough-hewn, as if it had been made by hand, by someone not particularly skilled or imaginative.
“You can understand how they feel,” Luwadis went on, waving a hand toward the large glass doors that led out onto a balcony. “The mob, I mean. Plure has killed more of us than anyone wants to think about. The mob wants him dead. So do I, for that matter. But we’ve agreed, by joining the Federation, to abide by Federation standards of justice. Plure should have a trial, and then he should be punished. Without that, there will be no guarantee that he is, in fact, the one responsible for all the crimes he’s been accused of. I’d rather have certainty than a quick death, even in this case.”