“No, Diego,” Fisher said. “I don’t think you do. She came to us a week ago looking for help—and if you hadn’t tied our hands, maybe we could’ve done something.” Contempt edged into his voice. “But everything with you has to be a god-damned secret.” He turned back to the group of medics and nurses. “Put her on the stretcher! Let’s get her up to the hospital!”
Fisher turned his back on Reyes and walked away. The medical team eased T’Prynn onto the stretcher, lifted her up, and followed Fisher and M’Benga toward the nearby turbo-lifts. Reyes watched them leave, unable to think of a single rebuttal to anything Fisher had said. All he could think of was the thousands of lives he had let be snuffed out on Gamma Tauri IV, the fear and the fury in Jeanne’s eyes as he’d watched her die, and now the smoldering carnage in his docking bay and T’Prynn’s shattered mind and blank eyes.
I could have evacuated the colony. Warned Jeanne. Overruled T’Prynn and declassified her medical records…. But I didn’t. There’s no one to blame but me. He spied his spectral reflection in an observation window and hated the man he saw staring back at him. Their blood is on your hands.
Reyes turned away from the physical and metaphysical damage his decisions had wrought on the lives of those around him and tried to walk away from it, back to work and routine and duty. But there was no walking away; the consequences of his actions shadowed his every thought—just as he knew they would, today and every day, for the rest of his life.
He recalled the words of his late mentor and Academy sponsor, Captain Rymer: It’s called being in command.
Pennington and Quinn sat together on a grassy slope on the edge of Vanguard’s terrestrial enclosure. It had been half an hour since they were evacuated from the thoroughfare after summoning medics to help T’Prynn. No one had asked them any questions; they had simply been told to move along and clear the area.
“Should we go to Manón’s?” Pennington had asked.
“I don’t feel much like celebrating,” Quinn had replied, “and I don’t think the Sagittarius crew will, either.”
He’d agreed with Quinn, and they had found themselves drifting aimlessly across the greenswards of the enclosure, past Fontana Meadow, toward the sparsely wooded incline that ringed the park’s perimeter. There had been no deliberate plan, just a shared sense that neither of them wanted to return to the ship in which they’d been stuck for almost a week, nor to the empty set of rooms that Pennington laughingly called his apartment.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Quinn said.
Sketching with a twig in the cool, dark dirt, Pennington replied, “You mean the explosion?”
“No,” Quinn said. “T’Prynn.”
Pennington nodded. He, too, had been shaken by the primal scream that had preceded the Vulcan woman’s collapse. Public displays of torment were unsettling to him even when he expected them; had T’Prynn been human, the horror and pain in her voice would still have haunted him. But to watch a Vulcan, especially one who was so disciplined and controlled, shatter so completely had been heartbreaking.
“What’d she say to you? Before she collapsed.”
Quinn lowered his eyes and seemed to peer millions of miles beyond the ground at his feet. He sighed. “She said I was free.”
“Free?” echoed Pennington. “Of what?”
“Everything. Debt. Ganz. Her…. Just free.”
Pennington pondered this new information. “Because of what we did for the Sagittarius?” Quinn nodded in confirmation.
Hunching forward against his knees, Pennington reconsidered his memory of T’Prynn approaching his apartment door, hesitating to knock, and walking away. She didn’t have to do right by Quinn, he thought. But that doesn’t change what she did to me.
He took the slender, cylindrical recording device from his jacket pocket and set it for playback. The emitter crystal in its base projected a small holographic image in the air between him and Quinn. He skipped past the images of the Malacca atilt and aflame, to the shot of T’Prynn at the window.
Every detail was razor-sharp: the tears rolling from her eyes, grief’s trembling disfigurement of her face, even Quinn’s silent recoiling in the background. Pennington studied the moment, his throat tightening in empathy for her suffering.
He looked at her right hand pressed desperately against the window, as if she had longed to reach through the flames of the crippled ship to save someone. In that instant he saw himself standing in the same pose months earlier, his hand against the window as he’d watched the blackened and broken remains of the U.S.S. Bombay being returned to Vanguard, piece by piece, by the crew of the Enterprise. He remembered grieving for Oriana, his lover, who had died aboard that ambushed vessel. Suddenly, the pain in T’Prynn’s eyes was as familiar as his own, and he intuited the reason for her breakdown: someone she had loved had been on the Malacca.
Despite the fact that the device’s playback was muted, he vividly recalled T’Prynn’s cry of anguish as she threw her head back. Then she collapsed to the deck, and the recording froze on its last frame of data. Quinn and Pennington stared at it for a long moment before the pilot asked, “Now what?”
T’Prynn’s open eyes stared forlornly at Pennington from the holographic freeze-frame. This isn’t news, he decided. This is one person’s tragedy, and it’s nobody else’s business. Not even mine. He selected the portion of the recording from its end to the moment before it first caught sight of T’Prynn and deleted it permanently from the recorder’s memory.
“You could’ve used that, you know,” Quinn said.
Pennington nodded. “I know.” He shut off the recorder and tucked it back into his pocket.
“If she’d done to me what she did to you…” Quinn paused and looked away before he finished, “Not sure I could forgive her.”
“I haven’t,” Pennington said. “But some lines I won’t cross. What she did is on her conscience. What I do is on mine.”
Quinn gave him a friendly slap on the back. “You’re a better man than I am.”
“No, I’m not,” Pennington confessed. “Just a better man than I used to be.”
30
Ambassador Jetanien paced beside Reyes’s desk and reviewed the details of Theriault’s report from a data slate clutched in his clawed manus. In the hours that had passed since the attack on the Malacca, Reyes had grown silent and detached. As a result, Jetanien was finding it necessary to take a more active role in this debriefing than he had expected.
“This is truly remarkable, Ensign,” the Chelon diplomat said. “Considering the violent nature of our past encounters with the Shedai, this might well constitute the Federation’s true first contact with them as a civilization. Splendidly done.”
“Thank you, Ambassador,” Theriault replied. She was seated beside Captain Nassir, in front of Reyes’s desk.
Tapping the data slate with one claw, Jetanien asked, “Are you absolutely certain that the—” He looked down at the data slate and verified the name. “That the Apostate confirmed the link between the Shedai and the Tholians?”
“Yes, sir,” Theriault said.
Jetanien’s beak clicked with excitement. “Fascinating,” he said. Then he turned toward Captain Nassir. “Now, about the entity you confronted on the planet’s surface…did it happen to look anything like this?” He activated a screen on the wall to the captain’s left. On it was a playback of the attack on the New Boulder colony. Dark ribbons of energy and flashes of lightning snared small transport ships trying to make their escape and crushed them or dashed them against the ground.
Nassir’s face paled as he watched the horrific scene. “That’s exactly what came after us on Jinoteur,” he said.