Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [126]
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 Pegasus accelerated 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.
“The Endyk 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.”
“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