Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [23]
He was alone here, so the question of whether they would all beam in together had been answered. Picking a meeting place had been the simplest precaution, but he was glad they had made the effort. A good portion of this first day might be spent by the squadron members trying to find their way to the Nob Hill location. And for all he knew, others might be even farther away than he was, or in more remote locations. Nob Hill would be a good hike, for him, but not too difficult.
He noted the position of the morning sun, and then started east, toward it, following the broken, overgrown road away from the ocean and into the city.
Chapter 6
Another failure. That Riker has more lives than a damned Antillean feenetchluk.
And how many is that? How much longer do we have to play this game?
The feenetchluk has eleven redundant nervous and circulatory systems that reconfigure themselves in the event of serious injury. You think you’ve killed one but it just shuts down for a few moments, and then comes back at you, scared and angry but not dead. Hence the saying.
Maybe it is just dumb luck, though. Maybe he should be playing dabo someplace, since he seems to survive every attack we throw at him, not by effort of will or any particular ability, but through simple twists of fortune.
Or by simply refusing to concede.
Perhaps. Luck or lives, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he’s scared now. Fearing for his life, his safety, his career. That means he’s off balance, and therefore right where we want him. He’ll start making mistakes. We can keep this up indefinitely, playing him, making him suffer.
As we have suffered.
Exactly. In the end, that’s better than killing him right away. His suffering is so delicious, so… right. And we know that he can’t run from us. He can’t hide, not for long. No matter where he goes, we will have our pleasure.
Yes… that’s the perfect word to describe it. Our pleasure is Riker’s pain, and his death our ultimate release.
San Francisco’s civilian spaceport, at the edge of the bay, never slept. All day and all night transport vehicles from all across the planet rumbled into the port, laden with goods destined for distant planets, and those same vehicles, equally burdened, left with imported goods for markets on Earth. Lights burned through the dark of night, engines roared, the voices of working men and women mixed with the clatter and whine of the servos and gears of robotic helpers. Cargo and tourists alike left from this port, ferried to orbital platforms from which the big ships, the deep spacefaring craft, would launch.
Kyle made his way here by a roundabout path, taking underground transport part of the distance, then getting off and walking for a while, then catching an air tram for another segment. If anyone’s gaze fell on him for more than a few moments he changed course or mode of travel. A few times, he thought Tholians had spotted him, but he managed to both avoid them and convince himself that he was merely seeing things, that there were no Tholians trying to kill him, here on Earth. Although plenty of humans were doing their best to make up for that shortage, it seemed.
Finally, as the eastern sky turned from slate gray to pale blue, he approached the great port, thrilling a little as he always did to the rhythmic bustle of enterprise and the stirring adventure of people traveling to the farthest reaches of the universe. He loved his home planet, but his work had taken him off it enough times that he was comfortable in space or on good old terra firma, and the idea of travel always held the promise of the new and unexpected.
This time, though, he wasn’t traveling for fun or business, but for survival. Since it seemed certain that whoever was after him-for whatever