I could get used to this.
After a moment, his right hand turning his glass in a slow circle as it sat atop his thigh, Reyes said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Tim, but what the hell are you doing here? I know you didn’t come all this way for a drink.”
“Well,” Pennington said, “for what it’s worth, I also haven’t eaten since breakfast.”
Releasing another small laugh, Reyes sipped from his whiskey. “I’ll get right on that. Okay, out with it. What really brought you to the ass end of space? To talk to some washed-up relic nobody’s going to remember in a hundred years?”
“There are a handful of people who know the truth about what happened out there,” Pennington replied, holding up his glass and swirling its contents. “Not much was said about your departure. Top secret, hush-hush and all that. Starfleet and the Federation have washed their hands of you, so I figure now was as good a time as any to try cornering you somewhere and getting you to tell me your side of the story.”
Reyes eyed him. “You can read about it in my memoirs. I’ve got a contract from Broht and Forester sitting on my desk. They want a juicy tell-all book for Christmas.”
Laughing at that, Pennington shook his head. “That’d get some Starfleet knickers in a twist, wouldn’t it? I’m impressed you even know the name of a major publishing company.”
“I got it from one of the books Zeke gave me before I left the station,” Reyes replied, waving toward one of the shelves near the fireplace. “The first time, that is. You know, before all that fun I had with the Klingons and Orions.”
“Right, that,” Pennington said, his gaze settling once again on the fire. “Quite a holiday you had there. You never talked much about that before you left, either.”
“I lost the books Zeke gave me,” Reyes said, “thanks to those Orion pirates’ blowing up my prison transport.” He paused, and Pennington wondered if he was recalling the events of what had to have been a most bizarre day, or if his thoughts had turned to his longtime friend, Ezekiel Fisher. “I had to get new copies made,” he added after a moment, “just so I could find out how they ended. Bastards.” Chuckling again, Reyes finished the whiskey in his glass before rising from his chair and crossing the room to the kitchen. Pennington did not turn to follow his movements, but he did look up when the other man returned to the fireplace, whiskey bottle in one hand and his refilled glass in the other. Without saying anything, Reyes gestured toward Pennington’s glass, and the journalist held it up for a refill.
“I figure this might take a while,” Reyes said, setting the bottle on a small table positioned between the two recliners before reclaiming his seat.
Pennington shifted in his chair in order to regard the former, now-disgraced Starfleet officer. “As it happens, I have time to kill.”
“It’s not like they’ll ever let you write about it,” Reyes said, his gaze drifting to the fire before them. “You try publishing anything, and the best you can hope for is being allowed to retire gracefully to some backwater colony.”
“Maybe we could be roommates?” Pennington suggested.
“Not for nothing,” Reyes replied, “but I have a shovel and access to a lot of uninhabited forest. You won’t be missed. At least, not for a while.”
Laughing at that, Pennington said, “Noted.” He paused, watching flames lick at one of the logs burning in the fireplace, before adding, “Look, I know there’s no way a lot of what happened will be made public, certainly not within our lifetimes and perhaps not ever, but I still want as much of the story as I can pull together, for my own curiosity and maybe even for my sanity. I’d like to think that what we all experienced meant something, even if most people will never really know about it. Does that sound so crazy?”
“No, it doesn’t sound crazy at all.” Reyes sipped from his glass, saying nothing for a moment, but then he released a sigh that to Pennington’s ears sounded more than a bit like resignation.
“All right. What do you want to know?”
THE TAURUS REACH
2268
1
“What do you want to know?”
Tim Pennington had to strain in order to hear the question over the din permeating the Omari-Ekon’smain gaming floor. Even standing less than an arm’s length from the person he was talking to, he had to shout to be heard.
“I want to know what the hell you’re doing here!” Pennington said, then looked around as he realized his voice had carried above the dull roar around him, and likely to ears not belonging to his intended target, Diego Reyes. The last time Pennington had seen him—almost a year ago, now—Reyes had been wearing a Starfleet commodore’s uniform, but now the man seemed quite at home in an open-necked dark shirt and pants, over which he wore a black leather jacket. His hair, far more gray than black now, was longer on the sides, though still thinning on top. To Pennington, the former Starfleet officer appeared no different than the other civilian customers taking up space on the gaming floor.
Leaning against the bar, a thin rectangular glass held in his left hand, Reyes paused to scan the faces of nearby patrons, as though trying to verify that he and Pennington were not being overheard. He considered his glass before downing its contents in a single swallow, grimacing at its taste before returning his attention to Pennington. “It’s a long story.”
“I gathered as much,” the journalist replied, taking care now to ensure his voice did not rise above the crowd noise. Still, he tossed glances over both shoulders to check for potential eavesdroppers, but saw no sign of anyone appearing to engage in such activity. Everyone in the room appeared to be focused on the gaming tables, or their meals as they sat at tables or in booths, or the lithe figures of the Orion waitresses as they drifted around and among the patrons. A thin veil of multihued smoke lingered near the ceiling lights, a by-product of the different tobaccos and other noxious substances of which various customers were partaking. Pennington tried not to think about the potential damage being inflicted upon his own lungs at that moment.
The man now standing before Pennington seemed to possess only a superficial resemblance to the Starfleet flag officer he once had been. How much time had passed since they had last spoken? More than a year, the journalist recalled, before Reyes’s arrest by Captain Rana Desai and imprisonment while awaiting court-martial. Pennington had missed those proceedings, electing instead to travel to Vulcan with Starbase 47’s former assistant chief medical officer, Jabilo M’Benga. The doctor had made the journey while escorting his patient, T’Prynn, who at the time had fallen into a coma following a severe neurological trauma. By the time her condition was treated and she and Pennington left Vulcan on what at best could be described as a circuitous journey back to Vanguard, they had learned of Reyes’s trial and conviction, and his sentencing to ten years’ confinement at a penal colony back on Earth.
What had come as a shock was their learning of an attack on the U.S.S. Nowlan,the transport vessel carrying the disgraced officer to Earth. The ship had been reported destroyed with all hands, so it came as an even greater surprise to subsequently learn that Reyes was alive and in Klingon custody. Further, it appeared that the former Starfleet commodore had provided the captain of the Klingon vessel with sensitive information, ensuring a successful attack on Starbase 47. For reasons that remained a mystery, Reyes had found a way to trade his Klingon hosts for Orions—specifically, the merchant prince Ganz and the crew of the Omari-Ekon,where he had been for the past several months. Though the vessel was docked at Vanguard, it remained sovereign Orion territory. As such, Reyes was beyond the grasp of Starfleet regulations and Federation law.