Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [36]
“They’re right, Boon,” Will said. “If you don’t think so, you don’t know much about Starfleet’s history.”
Boon shook his head, scoffing at the others. “Some people are so naďve,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, when I’m sitting in that captain’s chair, I hope I don’t have any dreamers like you all on my crew to worry about.”
“With an attitude like that,” Will replied, “I don’t think you’ll ever have to worry about being in the captain’s chair at all.” He was surprised that this side of Boon had never emerged before. But then, he hadn’t know the Coridanian that long, just during this school year. And none of their group projects had forced them to spend as much time together as this one would. Any personality conflicts that were simmering beneath the surface would surely come out during the week’s forced intimacy.
Boon leaned forward threateningly and Will braced himself, believing that the Coridanian was going to attack him instead of Felicia. Boon had height and reach on him, Will knew, and if it was going to be a fight it would be a brutal one that he would either win quickly or not at all.
Before either male could surrender to the testosterone that fueled them, however, Estresor Fil inserted her tiny form between them. “I need to eat,” she implored. “Now.”
Will held Boon’s yellow eyes for a few more seconds, then ticked his head toward the diminutive Zimonian. “She’s right,” he said. “We need to get her fed-all of us, really-and we need to stick together. You willing to do that?”
Boon breathed heavily, but Will could see his body relax, his fists unclench. “Yeah, okay,” he said, sounding a bit reluctant to call off the fight. Will had the sense that their reckoning was merely postponed, not canceled.
With the tension dissipated, though not eliminated, they turned once again to the question of food. Finding some was not difficult-no one went hungry in San Francisco-and they ate at an outdoor table. Boon and Will sat at opposite ends, but the group kept the conversation away from the recent incident between them. Dennis steered it back toward the question of lodging for the night.
“If we’re going to avoid public shelters,” he said, with a furtive glance toward Boon, “then we’re going to have to come up with some alternative. I don’t want to spend the night on the streets, and we can’t go back to our rooms at the Academy.”
“Let’s approach it as if we really were on a mission,” Will suggested. “We’d want to stay someplace discreet, where the local authorities wouldn’t notice us. We wouldn’t want to interact much with the locals, if we could help it, until we had the lay of the land better. Since we spent most of today trying to meet up and then climbing mountains, we didn’t really get to do that.”
“I know a place,” Felicia offered.
“Where?” Dennis asked her. “I hope it doesn’t involve any more climbing.”
“Remember that doorway that Estresor Fil found this morning? No one went in or out. The windows were all blacked over. I think it’s an empty space, and obviously it’s not getting much use, if any.”
“You want to break in?” Dennis asked, surprised.
“Exactly. We don’t have to hurt anything. We just go in, sleep, and leave in the morning.”
“That’s illegal,” Estresor Fil pointed out.
“So?” Boon asked, the first word he’d said since he and Will had faced off on the street. “Like she said, we wouldn’t hurt anything. If we were on an away mission in hostile territory, we wouldn’t hesitate to break a few minor laws to save our own skins.”
“I suppose,” Estresor Fil said, more loquacious now that her stomach was full. “Although I don’t feel very comfortable with the idea. Weren’t we specifically forbidden from breaking laws?”
“There are laws and there are laws,” Boon argued. “In San Francisco, anyone who doesn’t have a place to sleep is entitled to go to one of the public shelters. That’s why they have them. But if we don’t want to do that-and if we were on a secret mission here, that would be the last place we’d want to show up-then we have to bunk someplace else. We don’t want to stay in a tourist hotel,