Taking Wing - Michael A. Martin [7]
So much to explore, he thought, at once humbled and exhilarated by the realization. Who’s out here? What will we find waiting for us? And what’ll we learn along the way? These were the same questions that had led him to join Starfleet years ago. Now, as then, he could think of only one certain way to unveil the answers.
Soon, he told himself. Soon…
“Will?”
Deanna. He was suddenly grounded again, the solidity of his starship sure and tangible once more, though the rushing star clusters and nebulae remained. Standing in the center of the spherical holotank, he’d been so immersed in the simulation that he hadn’t noticed her entering the cartography lab.
“Computer, deactivate audio,” Riker said, abruptly silencing the music of the immortal Satchmo.
Deanna came up alongside him, her eyes searching his as they met. “Are you all right?” she asked.
He nodded and wrapped an arm around her shoulders; she reciprocated, slipping one of her arms around his waist. “Just looking over the road ahead,” he said quietly.
“And how does it look to you?”
The question took him off guard, forcing him to grope blindly for an answer. “Big,” he said finally, unable to keep a slight laugh out of his voice.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t take such a long view,” she said lightly. “Just take it a step at a time.”
Grinning, he asked, “Is that my counselor talking, or my wife?”
Deanna shrugged. “Does it matter? It’s good advice either way.”
His brow furrowed; he could read her emotions as clearly as she could anyone else’s. “Is something wrong?”
She hesitated, then said, “I know what this assignment means to you, what you think it represents. I know you take it very seriously—”
“Well, shouldn’t I take it seriously?” he asked, interrupting her, his words coming out more sharply than he had intended.
Deanna let it pass. “It shouldn’t be a burden, Will. That’s all I meant.”
Riker sighed, leaning forward on the railing and looking down into the void, watching the stars as they continued to stream by below him. “I know. It’s just hard not to think that there’s a lot at stake. I look back on the last decade and I wonder how so much could have happened, how so much could have changed. Sometimes I felt like we were speeding through a dark tunnel, with no way to turn, and no idea what we’d hit next. The Borg, the Klingons, the Dominion…We spent most of those years preparing for the next fight, the next war.” He didn’t bother to mention this last difficult year aboard the Enterprise; he didn’t need to. She knew as well as he what they had endured.
He turned to her again, saw that she was now watching him carefully. “Now we’ve come out the other side, and for the first time in nearly a decade, it feels like we have a chance to get back some of what we lost during those years. We can do the things we set out to do when we joined Starfleet in the first place—the things I grew up believing Starfleet was primarily about. The Federation’s finally at the point of putting ten years of near-constant strife behind it. This mission, this ship, is my chance—our chance—to help. That burden is real, Imzadi. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t exist.”
Deanna smiled gently at him, then reached up to touch the side of his face. “You shouldn’t. But you can share it. That’s why you have a wife, and a crew. So you don’t have to shoulder it alone.”
He took her hand, kissed the palm of it, and nodded. “You’re right. And I won’t. I promise.”
“Bridge to Captain Riker.”
Still holding his wife’s hand, Riker tapped his combadge. “Go ahead, Mr. Jaza.”
“Sir, the U.S.S. Seyetik has docked at Utopia Station