Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [1]
He let the sentence trail off there. It didn’t matter. The man he’d been talking to-talking at, running off at the mouth toward, he decided-had ceased to listen and was leaning toward the bartender, signaling for another Alvanian brandy. Kyle, drinking instead a sixty-year-old single malt from right there on Earth, recognized that he had probably reached his own limit. His limits were stricter these days than they had once been, and he was better about enforcing them. Had to be. He gripped the bar with both hands as he lowered himself from the stool, and with a wave at Inis, the shapely Deltan bartender who was two-thirds of the reason Kyle came here in the first place, he headed for the door.
You sound like an old fool, he mentally chided himself as he went. The bar was thirty-five stories up, with floor to ceiling windows facing west, and the sun, he could see as he walked out, was an enormous red ball sinking into the sea on the far side of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s sunset, he thought, that’s the problem. There had been a time when he’d liked sunsets, but that had been before Starbase 311. As he went to the elevator that would take him down to the twentieth floor, from which he could tube across the street to his own building, he remembered another sunset when he’d had virtually the same conversation. He’d stopped himself, on that occasion, at about the same moment, and said, self-pityingly, “This is the kind of story a man should tell his son. If he had, you know, a son he could talk to. Because a boy needs to hear that his dad-“
“Kyle, dear,” Katherine Pulaski had said then, interrupting him, “shut up.” She had taken away his drink.
Too many painful memories associated with sunsets, he thought. But the wounds had been fresher then, the scars more raw. He was better now. Obviously not whole-you don’t jabber at strangers in bars like you were doing if you’re whole. But better, nonetheless.
When he rounded the bend toward his door, he saw a uniformed Starfleet officer, young and well-scrubbed but with a strangely vacant look in his pale green eyes, standing outside his apartment. A yeoman in a red duty uniform. Kyle had been drinking, but not really that much, and seeing this unexpected sight brought him around to sobriety fast. The yeoman started toward him.
“Are you Kyle Riker?” he asked. His voice sounded odd, as if he were distracted by something even as he voiced the question.
“Yes,” Kyle said. Most of his work was for Starfleet. Maybe the young man was a messenger. But he didn’t see a parcel, and couldn’t imagine any message that would have to be delivered in person. Anyway, he had just been at headquarters before heading home-well, heading for the bar on the way to heading home, he admitted. If anyone had needed to tell him anything they could have done it there.
“I need to see you for a moment, Mr. Riker,” the yeoman went on. His expression-or lack of one, to be more accurate, Kyle thought-didn’t change. He didn’t even blink. “Can we go inside?”
“I… sure, come on in.” Kyle pressed his hand against the door and it swung open for him. “Can I ask what this is about?”
The yeoman nodded but didn’t verbalize a response as he followed Kyle into the apartment. For a moment Kyle thought this was all the setup for some kind of elaborate practical joke. Friends would pop out from hiding places and wish him a happy birthday. Except that it wasn’t his birthday, nowhere near it, and he didn’t have friends with that kind of sense of humor. He didn’t have that kind of sense of humor. That was something else he’d left on Starbase 311.
The yeoman came into his apartment and the door swung shut behind him. “I’d really like to know who you are, young man, and what this is all about,” Kyle said, more forcefully than before. “Now, before we go any further.”
He waited for an answer. But the man’s face didn’t change, and he didn’t speak. Instead, he drew a phaser type-2 from a holster on his belt. Kyle threw himself to the floor, behind a couch, thinking, That’s some message.
The yeoman fired, and the phaser’s