His wife glared at him with a hatred like ice.

“What was her name?”

He had rehearsed a thousand lies in case this day ever came. Telling stories fleshed out with fine details was his stock-in-trade. He dealt by day in facts and obstinate truths, which had only given him a better appreciation for what they sounded like. Inventing a clever but unimpeachably simple cover story had been easier than he had expected. All that remained now was to let the story work its wonders.

Instead, his mouth blurted out “Oriana.”

Lora’s fury dissolved into agony, then she screamed with rage as she hurled her knickknacks at him, one after another. A porcelain rabbit pelted the top of his head. He yelped in pain as the horn of a pewter unicorn impaled his thigh. Pennington fell to the floor and retreated into a fetal curl behind the overturned coffee table as his wife continued her barrage.

When it finally ceased, he opened his eyes to find her sitting cross-legged on the other side of the room, weeping angrily into her palms. “You bastard,” she said between distraught whimpers. “Damn you.”

He was still too shell-shocked to leave the protective cover of the coffee table. “Lora,” he began, “I…I just—”

“Shut up, Tim. Just shut up.” She thrust her hands away from her face, revealing her tear-streaked makeup and swollen eyes. “I’m done talking to you. Get out.”

“It’s my apartment,” he said.

“You found another bed before, you can do it again. Get out.”

Pennington crawled first on to the couch, then he pushed himself back to a standing position from there. He picked up his bottle of whiskey, which lay on its side on the sofa. Inspecting it close up, he realized it was empty. He cast a bitter glare at Lora, then he turned and hurled the empty bottle into the bedroom. It shattered on the wall above the bed, sprinkling the sheets with countless shards of glass.

“Sleep well,” he said, then staggered out of his home with no other place to go. Walking away from his front door, he grew more aware with every step that because of one critical mistake, the life he had known was gone—his reputation, his career, his marriage…and then he realized, with the perfect clarity of the damned, who he had to thank for his current circumstances.

Time for a little talk, he decided. Face-to-face this time.

19

Lieutenant Uhura read through the results of her work one additional time. Soft synthetic tones signaled incoming transmissions and completed computer functions. The Enterprise’s computer had been working overtime comparing Tim Pennington’s allegedly fraudulent evidence with the Enterprise’s own databank records regarding the destruction of the Bombay, and with its copy of the recordings on the Bombay’s emergency buoy. A gentle whirring emanated from the console in front of her, caused by fans that were cooling some of the more sensitive circuits in the delicate duotronic system.

She locked the latest results of her studies on the screen beside her work panel, then swiveled her chair toward the first officer, who was conferring quietly with Captain Kirk at the science station. “Captain? Mr. Spock? I’ve completed my analysis.”

The two men needed no further prompting. They halted their conversation and joined her at her station. Kirk leaned forward, his hand on the back of her chair, while Spock stood tall behind him, hands folded behind his back. Before the change to the new uniforms, Uhura would not have paid much attention to the captain’s proximity, but the high cut of her miniskirt made her a bit self-conscious. Tugging it down, she corrected her posture and turned her chair demurely away from the captain.

Kirk said, “Report, Lieutenant.”

“It’s just as you suspected, Captain.” She pointed at some highlighted items on her screen. “The documentation itself is fake, but much of its content was accurate.” Switching the screen to a specific example, she continued, “For instance, the intercepted comm traffic that shows military activity by the Tholians is genuine, but Pennington’s source put it on the wrong frequency.” Another screen of information appeared at her touch. “His lead about the Bombay transporting a sensor screen to the outpost on Ravanar IV was correct, and the documents that supported it were in authentic Starfleet formats, but the names of supervising officers on the forms were obviously wrong.”

“A logical tactic—if the forger wanted the documents to be easily discredited,” Spock said.

Uhura wasn’t following Spock’s reasoning. “But if the goal was to discredit them, why fill them with real intelligence?”

“Guilt by association,” Kirk said.

“Precisely, Captain,” Spock said. Looking back at Uhura, he continued, “Discrediting the documents was not the goal, Lieutenant. Using the documents to discredit the truth they contained was the objective.”

Uhura looked at the data again, and this time she was appalled. “Then whoever did this had access to all the real intelligence data,” she said.

Spock nodded. “A logical deduction.”

“In other words, Starfleet created this fraud,” Uhura said.

Kirk straightened his posture. “I believe the preferred term is ‘disinformation campaign.’ ”

“Sir,” Uhura said, turning her chair toward Kirk, “this ‘disinformation campaign’ smeared the reputation of a civilian reporter. Shouldn’t we do something to correct that?”

The captain seemed reluctant to answer her. He looked at Spock, who arched an eyebrow, then said to Uhura, “There is nothing we can do, Lieutenant.”

“I don’t understand,” Uhura said. “We have the evidence. We know that it’s real, that his facts were essentially true even if the fine print was wrong. Why can’t we—”

“Because it would be a court-martial offense,” Kirk said.

Uhura stared in shock at Kirk, then she looked to Spock for a second opinion. He lifted one eyebrow and said, “The captain is correct. Commodore Reyes ordered us to purge our databanks of all information regarding our mission to Ravanar IV. We can not use this information to exonerate Mr. Pennington in the court of public opinion…no matter how unfairly we know he was treated.”

Shaking her head, Uhura said, “That’s not justice.”

“No, Lieutenant,” Kirk said, “it’s not. But as someone recently told me, justice has a long memory…. And something tells me it won’t forget about Mr. Pennington any time soon.”

Absorbed in his handwritten notes for his speech at the Bombay memorial, which was scheduled for the following morning, Reyes walked into his quarters and heard the door close behind him—taking with it most of his reading light.

His quarters were almost completely dark. Looking around, he saw that the only source of illumination in the main room was a lone candle on his dining table. It cast a soft ring of golden radiance over a small circle of serving plates and bowls, all filled with food. Seated at the table was Rana Desai. She greeted him with a tiny wave of her hand. “I made dinner.”

Reyes joined her at the table and set down his notes beside his place setting. He hesitated to sit down. “Everything looks wonderful,” he said. “What’s the occasion?”

“It was my turn,” Desai said.

He nodded and sat down. “The chicken smells great,” he said, even though he wasn’t hungry.

“Tandoori,” she said. “My mother’s recipe.”

Sorrow fell across Reyes’s face like a curtain. His head suddenly felt heavy, and his chin drooped toward his chest.

Desai was out of her chair and at his side immediately.

“Diego, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to…” Her apology trailed off as she gently coiled her arms around Reyes’s head and embraced him to her. “Zeke told me what happened. Why didn’t you come to me?”

“Because I’m stubborn,” he said.

“It was because of the inquiry, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She kissed the top of his head tenderly, a gesture he knew was one of sympathy. “You’re a stupid, stupid man sometimes.”