“Not our place? Christine, it’s our faultthat star-jelly got killed! We invited it here.”

“Like you said, Will, intervention carries risks. You made the choice to intervene, this is one of the consequences. But how far are you willing to escalate that intervention? And when did we decide to take the star-jellies’ side in this?”

“I haven’t taken sides. If I had, I’d have let Tuvok give them that sensor data. But I had to do something to show that we hadn’t sided against the jellies either. Think of this as a show of good faith.”

“Was that what you had in mind when you gave the order, or did you only just come up with it now? Sir?” That last was spoken more softly, a concession that she’d gone a bit too far. But it was unnecessary; Riker had to concede that she was right about that. She saw as much in his face, and went on. “You were acting on impulse, Will. On emotion. Frankly, I don’t think you’re being objective about this. It’s obvious that Deanna has formed a strong bond with these creatures. What hurts them hurts her, and you can’t bear to see her hurt.”

He looked at her sharply. “When I offered you this job, I gave you my word that I would never let my personal feelings for Deanna affect my command judgment.”

“And you offered me the job because you knew I wouldn’t hesitate to call you on it if you ever did. Because you knew you needed me to help you keep that promise. Well, here I am.”

Riker met her gaze for a long moment. “You’re right. And I appreciate it. I do need you as a check on my conscience, Christine. But you’re off-base about this. Yes, this is personal to me, but it’s not about Deanna. Not mainly, anyway.”

“Then what?”

He began to pace, gathering his thoughts. “You know as well as I do that the Federation’s been through some dark times lately. Our principles, our ideals, they’ve taken a beating in the name of survival. The Ba’ku incident…the attempted genocide of the Founders…”

Vale nodded. “And Tezwa.”

“And Tezwa,” he confirmed with a heavy sigh. For a split second he was back in that dank, stinking cell beneath the floor, screaming from Kinchawn’s tortures. A part of him would always be there. And it was his own president, a man he’d voted for, who had made Kinchawn happen. “All of us who were there, who know what happened, Christine—we all made the decision that it had to end. That we wouldn’t accept any more compromises. That we had to regain the moral high ground, stand firm on our principles from now on.”

“I’m with you there, of course,” Vale said. “But what’s that got to do with this? How does meddling in a conflict we don’t understand reaffirm our values?”

“There’s more to it than that, Christine.” He turned to the window, gazed at the prismatic streaks of starlight warping past. “All this time we’ve assumed that the corruption rose out of the desperation of the past ten years…the Borg attacks, the Klingon conflict, the Dominion War. That we never would’ve compromised our ethics if we hadn’t been driven to it, if our spirits hadn’t been beaten down by all the horror and destruction.”

“Okay.” She waited for the rest.

“But the first time we encountered a star-jelly…sixteen years ago, back in the Golden Age,” he said with sarcasm, “it was being tortured, exploited. The Bandi starved it and brutalized it into obedience, forced it to transform into a starbase and replicate anything its occupants craved. And they did it for us,Christine. For the Federation.”

“We didn’t know that’s what they were doing.”

He whirled. “And why not? Why didn’t we? When this simple, primitive agricultural society, a people with a tiny population and no industry, came to us and told us they could produce a state-of-the-art facility in sixteen months, it was obviously too good to be true. But we shrugged our shoulders and told them ‘sure, go right ahead,’ when we should’ve been demanding to know more about how they proposed to achieve this miraculous feat.”

“Starfleet sent the Enterpriseto investigate. They sent you.”

“But not until ‘Farpoint Station’ was already completed! Why did we wait so long?”

“Deneb is a remote world. Not much Starfleet traffic gets out that way. Not until we knew there was going to be a staging facility there for us to use, anyway.”

“That’s just it. It was a dream offer. A whole luxury frontier outpost built to order, prefab and ready to use without us having to lift a finger. A perfect launching point for opening up a whole new region of the Alpha Quadrant to exploration. We weren’t willing to look that closely, didn’t ask the questions we should’ve asked, because we didn’t want to jeopardize that prize. And so we allowed an innocent star-jelly to be tortured and abused for sixteen months,when we could’ve done something to prevent it.

“We were selfish, Christine. We knew something didn’t smell right, but we looked the other way because it suited our interests. And we didn’t even have the excuse of fighting a war! The Cardassian border wars had fizzled out, the Tzenkethi War was over, things were as peaceful as they ever got. Opening up the Cygnus Reach was going to be a bold adventure, a reaffirmation of our grand ideals of peace and learning—a lot like Titan’s mission is meant to be. And we started it out with an act of callous neglect for another being’s suffering.”

Out of breath, he paused to gather himself, then spoke again more quietly. “At times, I’ve wondered why Q chose Farpoint Station as a test case for whether humans had outgrown savagery. Why he chose that place and time to challenge our right to expand further into space, when we’d already been at it for centuries. Maybe he was trying to show us that we weren’t as evolved as we thought. Maybe he put us on trial becauseof the exploitation of that creature—and judged us on whether we chose to end it or sanction it.”

“If so, we passed the test. We made the right choice.”

“Picard made the right choice. The Federation—I’m not so sure.” He shook his head. “The hell of it is, we never really did that much exploring of the Cygnus Reach anyway. The Enterprisewas supposed to be the flagship of this new long-term venture into the unknown…but after the Farpoint incident, with no base that far out, it never really took off. The Bandi tried to rebuild Farpoint, but they just weren’t up to the task. Then Starfleet’s priorities shifted and the Enterprisespent most of its tour closer to home, conducting diplomatic or relief missions. In the end, everything that creature suffered, it was all for nothing. We compromised our principles for nothing, and all in the name of an ideal.

“Well, not this time, Christine. Not again. This is our second chance, and we have to learn the lessons of the first. We let the star-jellies down the last time, and we let ourselves down in the process. It can’t happen again.”

Vale took it in, nodding in acknowledgment. “Okay, Will,” she said, crossing her arms, “so what, then? Do we destroy the Pa’haquel’s whole way of life just to assuage Starfleet’s collective guilt? Or yours?”

He threw her a disbelieving look. “Giving up one custom doesn’t destroy an entire culture. I’m descended from people who built their nation on slavery and genocide, but giving those up didn’t destroy our culture—if anything, it brought it closer to its ideals.”

“Your ancestral culture also had a bad habit of telling other people how to live, saying it was for their own good, and practically wrecking their civilizations in the process. That’s part of why we have a Prime Directive in the first place.”

“So we should slink away and leave the star-jellies to their fate?”

Vale spread her arms. “You want the Pa’haquel to adapt—maybe it’s the jellies who need to adapt. Only their taboo about firing on their own is keeping them from evening the odds.”