Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [37]
“We don’t seem to have a lot of options,” Will agreed. “And it does seem like if you’re trying to hide from the authorities, going to a shelter run by those same authorities is a bad idea.”
“It’s hard to argue with that,” Dennis admitted. “I still don’t think I like the idea, but-“
“You got any better ones?” Boon interrupted.
“That’s precisely the problem,” Estresor Fil put in, having apparently been won over. “Either we don’t break any of Admiral Paris’s rules but we do the single thing that would most likely result in our capture, or we break rules judiciously and carry out our assignment.”
When she finished, all eyes went to Dennis.
“I don’t like it,” he said at last. “But since I can’t, in fact, think of anything better, I agree that it seems like the best of our limited options.”
By the time they’d finished their dinner, the sky had gone dark.
They caught an underground transport back to Nob Hill, checking the route maps to see if there were any obvious clues to an artist who spanned the globe. There weren’t, so they continued back to the corner at which they’d met earlier that day, and with which Will and Estresor Fil had become so familiar. At the doorway alcove, Boon took the lead in the breaking-and-entering process. He said he’d done it several times, at home on the hardrock mining planet of Coridan.
“Security might be a little better here,” Dennis suggested in a nervous whisper.
“Are you calling Coridan some kind of primitive backwater?” Boon demanded.
“No, not at all,” Dennis said quickly, backing away a step as if Boon’s words had carried physical force.
“Look, Boon,” Will said, stepping up and forgetting his earlier resolve. “I don’t know if your problem is that we elected Dennis to lead the squadron on this mission, or what. But you’re acting like someone with a chip on his shoulder the size of the moon. If you can’t leave your personal feelings behind and carry on with the mission, then you should just tell us now so we can report back to Admiral Paris that we failed.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Riker?” Boon asked with a snarl. “You sabotage everything you ever do, guaranteeing you’ll never succeed at anything so you won’t really be tested. You’d just love to shoot a hole in this project right off the bat.”
The accusation stunned Will. He had never thought of himself as self-destructive, and he doubted that Boon knew him better than he knew himself. But at the same time, he knew that sometimes others saw unpleasant traits in people that they couldn’t see in themselves. He decided to shelve any further examination of the issue, to consider later. Right now, they had a building to break into.
“Never mind my psychological shortcomings, Counselor,” he shot back. “Can you open that door or not?”
Boon had already turned away from the others and had the faceplate removed from the keypad. “Yeah, just give me a few minutes to reprogram this,” he said. Will tried to watch but Boon blocked his view with his broad shoulders and quickly moving hands. “This one’s easy. I’ve seen some with multiple redundant alarm systems, but this-well, I guess there’s nothing in here worth taking.”
“That’s okay,” Felicia said, sounding maybe a little nervous that she’d suggested this in the first place. “We’re not taking anything. Is there a lot of crime on Coridan?”
“A fair bit,” Boon said. He closed the faceplate and put his palm against the keypad, and the door irised open for him. “All that dilithium, you know, and other valuable minerals. Left us wide open for all sorts of folks to come around and take whatever they could get their hands on.” He stepped to the side and bowed toward the doorway, indicating that the others should enter first. As he did so, he looked right at Felicia. “Of course, if I read you right, you were asking if I committed a lot of crime on Coridan. Which, of course, is impossible-I wouldn’t have been accepted into the Academy if I’d had a criminal record,