Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [20]
At the appointed hour-stifling a yawn, his eyes burning from lack of sleep-Will met his squadron mates in the transporter room. Estresor Fil looked excited, for her: her eyes open wide and sparkling with some inner light, her lips parted in something that looked like a smile-in-training. Boon lounged against an operator console, apparently as barely awake as Will himself, although with Boon that was more or less his natural state. Felicia and Dennis chatted happily between themselves, in low tones.
He had thought that perhaps Admiral Paris would be here to see them off, but he wasn’t. Instead, there were only a pair of engineers and a security officer. The campus had been buzzing with word of an attack on a lone engineer in a Starfleet Command transporter room late the night before. Will had missed most of the rumors, his mind on other things, and intentionally made an effort not to listen to them because he was already overtired and knew that he needed to be able to devote all his attention to the mission at hand. But he figured it explained the extra precautions in this room, on this morning.
Felicia looked up from her hushed conversation with Dennis and noticed Will in the doorway. She smiled at him and beckoned him over. Dennis turned, too, at Felicia’s gesture, tossing Will a friendly grin of his own. “Glad you could join us, Will,” he said, sarcasm leavened by good-natured humor.
“I seem to be developing a bad habit,” Will said. “I never used to be late to everything.”
“You’re not late,” Felicia assured him. “We’re early. Just too excited about the project, I guess.”
Will bit back another yawn. He was excited too, and should have been early, but everything had taken extra effort this morning, from getting his breakfast, to dressing, to making his way here to the transporter room. He didn’t want to have to explain why, though. If the old man had gotten himself into some kind of trouble, it was no concern of Will’s. The last thing he wanted was for his squadron to think that he would be distracted by his father’s problems, whatever they may be.
“As long as I didn’t hold anything up,” he said. He recognized that much of his concern was due to his own impatience. Just this last project stood between him and summer break, which would be followed by his penultimate Academy year. Two more, and after that he could sign onto a starship and get off this planet for a while.
“Not at all,” Dennis assured him. “But now that we’re all here…” He addressed the pair of engineers. “We’re ready, I guess. Whenever you are.”
One of the engineers, a Bolian with an unusual fringe of brown hair around the back of his blue, bifurcated head, stepped forward then and examined the cadets. “No phasers, no tricorders, no padds, no combadges. You aren’t hiding anything from me, are you?”
“Not at all,” Dennis assured them. Boon, Will noted, hadn’t changed his position or his slumped posture, as if the whole process was so boring he could barely stay awake.
“Then I have one thing for you.” The Bolian handed Dennis a sealed envelope.
“Paper,” Estresor Fil noted. “How… antiquated.”
“You won’t have instruments with which to read anything else,” the engineer explained.
“We’re supposed to consider ourselves crash-landed in hostile territory,” Dennis added. “Without our technology to rely on.”
“That’s what they tell us,” the other engineer, a human female with swept-up blond hair, said. “Step onto the pads, please.”
The five cadets did as instructed. Boon was the last one in place. Will thought he seemed reluctant, maybe even resentful. Because we put Dennis in charge? he wondered. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that-it’s Boon’s last chance to lead this squadron, and I took it away from him. But it had been the squadron’s tradition to do so from time to time, so it shouldn’t have been entirely unexpected. And Boon himself had brought it up.
Will didn’t have a chance to worry about it any longer,