“Perfectly, sir,” Spires replied, his tone clipped and formal. He placed the stylus for his data slate on the table, clasped his hands before him, and leveled an unflinching stare at Reyes. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”
Reyes shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”
“Why am I here, sir?”
Finally,Reyes thought. There’s a pulse in there, after all.Keeping his expression neutral, he asked, “Do you have something better to do?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Before Reyes could respond to that, Spires plunged ahead. “Don’t get me wrong, Commodore. I want this case. I specifically askedfor this case. I want to help you, if I can, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. Whatever happens to you, my résumé will look a lot better for having accepted the challenge of representing you in the face of overwhelming odds.”
His expression revealed nothing, but Reyes felt a slight rush of satisfaction as he listened to the commander unload a small portion of the frustration he undoubtedly had buried beneath his veneer of outward calm. The commodore had no problem with ambition in a younger officer; it was a trait to be nurtured and harnessed for constructive purposes. Spires’s blunt honesty was also a quality Reyes could appreciate. Too few junior officers, in his opinion, suppressed the instinct to speak their minds when a situation warranted it, even when pressed to do so by a superior.
None of this meant that Reyes actually liked the man, of course. Not yet, anyway.
“You have to know that your fate has largely been decided already,” Spires continued. “The charges against you are rather straightforward. We might be able to argue our way out of the disobedience charge, and we might even be able to get the conspiracy charge dismissed. But releasing classified information? There’s no way around that, sir. The last time we spoke, you seemed to have accepted the inevitability of the situation, and from what I’ve been able to gauge so far, that hasn’t changed.” He picked up his stylus and began to twirl it between the fingers of his right hand. “For me, this begs the question of why you simply haven’t entered a guilty plea and dispensed with the need for a court-martial in the first place.”
Having drained the rest of his coffee before offering a reply, Reyes finally said, “Because I really don’thave anything better to do.” Sensing that Spires might try to stab him with the stylus, he held up his hand. “Not because I want to screw with you, Commander, though I admit I’ve decided it’s a nice bonus. You said it yourself. Pleading guilty does away with the need for a court-martial, which means they can throw me in a hole, and they get to do it without anyone else having to break a sweat. I’m not about to let that happen, at least not without a fight. I want a chance to speak my piece.”
He rose from his chair and moved across the room to the food slot. After punching the sequence for a new cup of coffee, Reyes turned from the unit to face his attorney again. “Now, I’ve told you everything I can relating to the charges against me, and you’ve had two weeks to read every scrap of data you can get your hands on. What I haven’t heard yet is what you plan to do with all of that information. I’m not interested in throwing myself on the mercy of the court, Commander. I want people to know how big this thing is, why we’re here, what we hope to accomplish, and the real price we’ve paid in pursuit of that goal.” He tapped his chest with the fingers of his left hand. “I don’t expect to win, but I aim to make some noise, and I expect you to be right there beside me, doing your best to piss off anyone and everyone they line up against me.”
The time he had spent in isolation had given Diego Reyes plenty of time for long and thoughtful reflection. Did he regret the actions he had undertaken? No. His remorse came from knowing that he could have, shouldhave, acted sooner, beforethe situation could escalate to the point of costing so many innocent lives. He mourned the loss of the U.S.S. Bombayand its crew, destroyed in battle against Tholian vessels. He grieved for those members of the Sagittariuswho had died on Jinoteur IV, crushed beneath what was now known to be only a minuscule demonstration of the awesome power wielded by the Shedai. As he lay awake on the cot in his cell, images of Jeanne Vinueza, his former wife and administrator of the colony on Gamma Tauri IV, haunted him every night before finally allowing him to drift off to fitful sleep.
After several moments spent in silence, Spires finally took up his stylus again and began writing on his data slate. “Well, then, where to begin? As for why you allowed that reporter to write about a classified Starfleet operation, as I said, that will be our toughest battle. I need to do some further research, of course, but from where I sit right now, it seems our best chance is to push for the idea that at least some of the orders you were following weren’t legal.” He paused, his stylus hovering above the data slate as he seemed to review what he had just said aloud. “For that to work, though, we’d have to demonstrate that you had no reason to believe the orders you were following were illegal. I take it you’re still against that strategy?”
“Absolutely,” Reyes replied. While others could be blamed for establishing the parameters by which the Federation had established such a marked presence in the Taurus Reach, the choices he had made at Gamma Tauri IV rested solely on his shoulders. The cost of that decision was his to pay.
He had made some small measure of recompense by allowing Tim Pennington to publish a recounting with as much detail as he could muster of the events the journalist had experienced while on Jinoteur IV. Pennington had acquitted himself with distinction on that occasion as he and his friend, a civilian merchant named Cervantes Quinn, had accomplished nothing less than save the Sagittariusand its remaining crew members from a Klingon vessel and the awesome power and weaponry the Shedai had wielded on that world.
Thanks to Pennington, much of the truth behind that incident was no longer a secret, and countless billions now were aware—at least to a degree—of the immense threat lurking within the Taurus Reach. Steps had to be taken to prevent further loss of innocent life. That meant either finding a way to combat the Shedai or retreating from this area of space altogether and leaving it to its original masters while hoping they would not seek vengeance for any wrongs they perceived as having been inflicted on them.
Before any of that could happen, the truth, all of it, must be revealed.
Weighing Reyes’s answer, Spires nodded after a moment. “You realize that the court-martial is likely to be closed proceedings, sir. Even with what’s already been leaked to the public, Starfleet will still want to restrict as much information as possible about Starbase 47 and Operation Vanguard.”
Reyes knew that Spires was currently working from a disadvantage stemming from that very desire, in that he had not yet been granted access to all of the information he would require in order to mount his defense for the coming court-martial. The commodore wondered what the young lawyer’s reaction would be once he received that opportunity and reviewed all of the files pertaining to Starbase 47 and its mission in the Taurus Reach.
If he’s smart, he’ll hop the first transport home.
“People will still find out, Commander,” he replied. “They might not need to know absolutely everything about what we’re doing, but they need to know when we screw up, particularly when it costs innocent lives. I’m tired of creating lies and stories to cover our asses out here. That’s not the mission I signed up for, and that’s not what Starfleet’s supposed to be about. I don’t think that iswhat it’s about, but I was dumb enough to get caught up in the machine. There are others caught the same way, because they were blinded either by duty or by conscious choice. Either way, the public has a right to know about them, just as they’re going to find out about me.”