Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [128]
“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.”
“You made the right decision,” Aronson said. “He’ll have a fair trial. If he’s guilty-which, on the face of it, seems pretty evident-he’ll be punished appropriately.”
“Appropriately?” Luwadis echoed. “Can he be killed seven hundred thousand times?”
“I don’t know much