Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [95]
He had to laugh. “Seems like I’m already pretty involved.”
“Among those of us on the committee,” she pointed out. “But not on the streets. The rest of them, the people who will be doing the dirty work, don’t know you-they don’t know anyone by name, so if any of them are arrested they can’t implicate anyone on the committee. We’ve all used noms de guerre.”
“That’s a good idea,” Kyle said. He knew that she had met with various planning committees while he worked-that while he had helped with the broad strokes planning, he hadn’t been around for much of the detail work. “But still, if you’re going to be out there I want to be next to you.”
Michelle shook her head again. “Absolutely not. Probably nothing will happen to me, and I’ll see you when it’s over and make passionate love with you. If, on the other hand, something does happen, the movement will need your skills to carry on.”
“My skills only go so far without someone like you to put my plans into action,” Kyle protested.
“Exactly my point,” Michelle said. “Someone needs to put this into action, and that’s me. If you object to me going out and acting, then we’ve got a problem.”
Kyle could see that arguing with her was going to be fruitless. In fact, he realized, in all the planning for today’s activities he had never been assigned a specific role. He’d thought that he would simply be accompanying Michelle, but now he realized it was because she knew he would object if she let him know ahead of time that he was being left behind. “All right,” he said, giving in for now. Another thing he knew was that when Michelle had made up her mind there was no budging her. “But you be careful.”
“Don’t worry,” Michelle promised him. “I love you too much to not come straight back here when it’s over.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Kyle said. “And watching.”
“You do that.” Michelle kissed him several times, and then dashed out the door, her face flushed with the excitement of the day. Kyle felt a surge of disappointment that he wasn’t going with her, combined with worry that he wouldn’t be around to watch her back. But the plan was for a nonviolent action today, more street theater than revolution, so there shouldn’t be much danger.
In a way, this was what Kyle was used to. In his Starfleet role, he was the adviser, the civilian who stayed back while others executed his plans. He had, he was fully aware, been responsible for the deaths of thousands, over the span of his career-Starfleet personnel as well as aliens he would never meet or even see in person. It wasn’t something he thought about very often, because it was a difficult burden to bear. Because he was good at compartmentalizing, that was an aspect of his life that he kept tucked away and didn’t take out to examine very often. When he did, he just accepted that it ran in his family.
His father had been a military man, as had his grandfather. His grandfather, he remembered with displeasure, had also been a tyrant at home, a martinet, running his household as he would have a starship if he’d ever held a command position. But probably because of his violent temper he never was put in charge of troops, so he had taken his aggressions out on his family instead. As the oldest son, Kyle’s father was first in line when his purple rages came upon him.
Kyle’s father, in his turn, had sworn never to lay a hand on his family in anger, and had kept that vow. From his military service he took a different lesson, that of self-discipline, of keeping his emotions in check, of leading the fragmented unit of his family into functioning as a whole. Kyle had, he hoped, put more of his father’s lessons into practice than his grandfather’s. To a certain extent, he supposed, he was genetically doomed to a military career and all the attendant difficulties. There had been very few generations of Rikers, as far back as