Fortune's Light - Michael Jan Friedman [1]
And there they were, pulling on their uniforms. The men who had once captured the hearts of all Alaska, and then broken them again, in short order. The legendary figures who had stirred such passion in young Will Riker that he sometimes couldn’t sleep at night.
He’d become obsessed with them. He’d learned everything he could about them. For a while he’d even pretended to be one of them.
Which, now that he thought about it, wasn’t so very different from what he was doing now.
So what if they no longer seemed larger than life? So what if their blemishes were there for all the world to see?
They were still his boyhood heroes, rousted from the pages of his mother’s book. And they still fired his imagination as few things had done before or since.
He took another step into the holodeck… .
“Commander Riker.”
It was Captain Picard’s voice. The summons was clipped, compact, typical of the captain. But it had a little more weightiness than usual—a certain urgency to it.
The first officer looked longingly at the world he had created. Then he took a step back and watched the holodeck doors close.
He hit his communicator. “Riker here.”
“There’s a classified transmission for you, Number One. It is coming in from Starbase Eighty-nine.”
Riker required a moment to absorb the information. “For me, sir?”
“Yes, for you. Specifically for you.”
The first officer cleared his throat. “Really,” he said. “Well, in that case, I’ll take it in my quarters.”
“As you wish, Number One. Mr. Worf is already making the necessary arrangements.”
Riker nodded through force of habit, even though the intercom carried only audio communications. “Thank you, sir.”
“You are quite welcome,” said Picard.
As Riker started down the corridor toward the turbolift, he wondered what kind of message could require his attention rather than his superior’s. Judging from the undertone of curiosity in the captain’s voice, his superior was wondering the same thing.
As Picard got up, Wesley turned to watch.
“Mr. Data,” he said, “you have the conn. I’ll be in my ready room if anyone needs me.”
The captain grasped the hem of his waist-length uniform jacket, pulled it taut with a crisp, compact motion, and headed for his ready room.
Wesley loved that gesture—the captain’s tug on his jacket. If the bridge had been no more than a storage bay, if there had been no computers on which to feast his intellect and no controls to measure his skills against, he would still have aspired to it for the sake of gestures like that one.
Until recently he hadn’t known exactly why, nor for that matter had he thought about it very much. Then he and his class had begun their course of study on Shakespeare.
“All the world’s a stage …” Well, maybe not all the world. But certainly the bridge of the Enterprise.
Wesley raised his eyes from his Ops panel long enough to scan the expansive two-tiered space. It was like a stage, wasn’t it? Crew members entered through the forward turbolift and exited through the aft, crossed from Science One to the coffee dispenser and back again. There was always something going on, always something to watch. And somehow every movement—even a trip to the head —had a theatrical feel to it, a special quality that made it seem larger than life.
Of course it was more than just the place. It was the personnel as well. “And all the people on it merely players.”
Wesley smiled to himself. Players, yes. But not “merely.”
There was nothing “merely” about Worf, for instance, standing guard over the tactical console like … like the ancient Colossus standing guard over Rhodes. Nothing insignificant about Data as he gazed at the massive main viewscreen with a childlike innocence that sometimes seemed deeper than the deepest wisdom.
Boy—pretty poetic, Wes. Maybe that Shakespeare stuff is contagious.
But the players who really drew Wesley’s interest were the ones at center stage, the ones who usually occupied the now-deserted command center.
Troi, with her … how would the Bard have put it? With her