Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [10]
When he got back to the dorm, he went to Dennis’s room. The redheaded, ruddy-faced cadet kept a worktable and chairs directly in front of his bay window, and he and Felicia Mendoza were sitting in them. On the couch sat Estresor Fil, a petite green Zimonian female, about the color of a fir tree, who barely passed the minimum height and weight requirements for Starfleet duty. Boon, a Coridanian, the lanky, laconic son of two miners from that underpopulated world, squatted on the floor at the foot of the couch. His skin color, common among some Coridanians, always reminded Will of an old brick storefront he had seen in Valdez, during his youth, both in texture and color. McGill’s Hardware, he remembered. He’d loved the smell inside there.
“Come on in, Will,” Dennis Haynes said. He was a gregarious fellow, every bit as sociable as Will was reserved. They seemed, at a glance, like polar opposites in almost every way, but had become fast friends in spite of that. Or because of it-Will had never been able to decide for sure.
“Sorry if I’m late,” Will said, entering the room and helping himself to one of the chairs scooted up near the worktable. The sky had gone dark outside, and the lights of the Academy grounds and the city beyond twinkled in the distance.
“How could you be late?” Estresor Fil asked. “There was no particular meeting time scheduled.”
The Zimonian seemed to Will to take everything said to her with the same degree of seriousness, as if mentioning that the day was warm or a dog was cute carried the exact same weight as a warning of a poisonous insect or a Romulan with a phaser. Add to that no sense of humor at all and a tendency to lecture rather than discuss, and you had Estresor Fil, who was Will’s least favorite member of Zeta Squadron, by far. She was so formal that she insisted both her names be used at all times.
She was also, he had to admit, brilliant.
Most of the work a cadet did at the Academy was done solo, but for those occasions when group efforts were needed, cadets were formed into five-person squadrons, and Zeta was his. Any Starfleet assignment was likely to be a team situation, so the cadets broke into their squadrons fairly often. There were good points and bad to this arrangement, of course. The starship atmosphere was fairly authentic, because most everyone on a starship worked with others. But it also meant relying on other people. Will was none too comfortable with that-he liked to have his fate in his own hands.
Once Will was seated, Boon looked at the group and took command, as he had a tendency to do. He was, he had told them often, grooming himself for a captaincy, and sooner would be better than later. Will thought his personal style was at odds with his ambition-he never liked to speak in public, for instance, and didn’t believe in using three words if one would do even in private. But in spite of his reticence, he was a good student and was seemingly driven by an urge that not even Will, who was plenty ambitious himself, could comprehend. “Okay, folks,” he said. “We have a challenge ahead of us tomorrow. Everybody ready?”
“Since we really can’t prepare,” Felicia replied, her dark eyes flashing as she tossed out a smile, “we’re probably as ready as we’re going to be.”
“There’s always preparation to be done, right?” Estresor Fil argued. “Admiral Paris told us enough to begin our planning. We know where we’ll be, and we know what our goal is. We might as well get started on whatever we can, while we have some time. Besides, he told us to, and that’s good enough for me.”
“In the abstract,” Will pointed out. “But not with any specifics.”
“That’s true,” Dennis added. “We know we’ll be in San Francisco. But we don’t know what part-or even if we’ll all be together.”
“I think we have to assume that we won’t be together, at first,