Sheer surprise, the impact of the unexpected, silenced Pennington for a moment. He stared at the duffel, memories of Oriana’s life and death flooding back into the fore-front of his thoughts. When he looked up at T’Prynn, she was as neutral in her expression as ever, but he thought he could almost detect a small hint of smug self-satisfaction in her demeanor.

Disgust grew inside him, like a dark bloom opening on a moonless night. “So what?” Not seeing any reaction on her part, he shook his head at her, chuckled grimly, almost pitied her. “Is this some kind of threat? Play ball or you’ll tell my wife about Oriana? Stop making trouble or you’ll smear my good name?” He stepped over the bag and walked forward, one unusually heavy, ponderous step at a time. “Well, guess what. Lora knows already. She left me. And my reputation? You already did a number on that, thanks a lot.” He planted his knuckles on her desk and leaned forward. “You’ve got nothing on me. Not a damn thing. I’m down, but I’m not done…. I’ll be watching you.”

He straightened his posture, never breaking eye contact with her. She remained as stoic and unblinking as ever. He wondered if she had even paid attention to a single word he said. It’s like talking to a bloody mannequin.

Pennington walked away from her, picked up the duffel, and headed for the door. Just before entering the range of the sensor that would open it for him, he looked back. “I’m your worst nightmare, Commander—a Scot with nothing left to lose.”

“My nightmares are worse than you could ever imagine,” T’Prynn said sharply. Before he could inquire about this abrupt sundering of her emotional control, she bolted from her chair and turned her back on him. “Good day, Mr. Pennington.”

Sensing the deadly seriousness of her dismissal, he left without pressing her patience further. Back in the corridor, he sighed with relief as gravity gave up some of its dominion over him, and the relatively cool air suddenly leached sweat from his overheated, overdried skin.

He wondered where to go next. Lora would still be packing, so returning home was out of the question for now. Then he remembered the Bombay memorial scheduled at 1100. It would be newsworthy, and if he left now he would be able to stake out a prime spot from which to listen, and record the event, and begin compiling his first non-FNS, purely freelance submission in several years.

It wouldn’t be much; it might not merit anything more than an unattributed two-line blurb at the end of a text feed. Earning his way back to credibility, back to being a headline reporter whose name was worth more than a punch line for a joke, would be a long and tedious journey. The pessimist in him asked how it could be worth such a struggle to rebuild his career when it would always carry this blemish of failure.

Then he faced his only other option: Quit and admit defeat.

Not bloody likely.

He stepped into the turbolift and decided to stop at the café before the memorial. If he really was going to start his career over again, he would need caffeine—and lots of it. Descending toward the terrestrial enclosure, words he had uttered defiantly to T’Prynn returned to him, this time as a solemn pledge that he made to himself:

I’m down, but I’m not done.

20

The door signal buzzed as Reyes was making a final check of his dress-uniform decorations. “Come in.” He heard the swish of the door opening as he adjusted the overly tight jacket.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the unmistakable, ponderous shape of Ambassador Jetanien. The Chelon diplomat turned his body one way then the other before he saw Reyes in the small alcove beside the door. “Are you ready to go?”

“Pretty much.” Reyes gave a last, ineffectual finger-combing to his thinning, dark gray hair. He stepped toward Jetanien, fully intending to lead the Ambassador out, but instead he came to a halt a few meters shy of the door.

Jetanien sounded concerned. “Something wrong?”

It was likely intended as a superficial query, along the lines of How are you?, but Reyes considered it carefully for several seconds. “Not exactly wrong,” he said finally, “but definitely on my mind.” Reyes interpreted Jetanien’s patient silence to mean that the Chelon was willing to hear him out. “A lot of hard questions got asked during the Bombay inquiry,” he said. “I got blindsided a few times, too. Now I wonder if maybe I deserved it.”

Folding his claws together at his waist, Jetanien asked, “How so?”

“The maintenance schedules…the matériel shortages. I put Hallie and her crew through the wringer, month after month, without a break. She never complained, so I figured everything was fine. But that was just Hallie’s way—she’d never make a fuss. She was always ready to make the best of a bad situation and give you a smile and say, ‘No problem.’ ”

Bowing slightly forward, into what seemed to be a pensive stance, Jetanien made a few low clicking sounds before he spoke. “Do you think that if the Bombay had been better maintained that it might have prevailed against the Tholian ambush?”

“No…. They were outnumbered, outgunned. It’s a miracle she put up as good a fight as she did.”

“Then it is not worth castigating yourself over,” Jetanien said. “Perhaps the deficiencies in the Bombay’s maintenance and supply were material factors in its loss at Ravanar—but it is just as likely that they were not.”

“Maybe,” Reyes said, “but I need to know. If simple mistakes got that ship destroyed—”

Jetanien interrupted, “Are we now to hold ourselves to an impossible standard? We are engaged in a long-term operation that is almost certain to claim more lives before it is done. Mistakes will be made—some by you, some by me, and more by countless others known and unknown to us. We are not infallible; neither are we omniscient or omnipotent.”

“But we drive ourselves as though we are,” Reyes said. “And we push others along with us…maybe too far.”

“Just as Captain Gannon pushed herself and her crew,” Jetanien countered. “They accepted the dangers of this mission, just as we did, because they knew that something greater than ourselves is at stake. It is the calculus of the few versus the many, Commodore—and you know as well as I that we have come too far to succumb now to doubt or indecision.”

“That still doesn’t answer the only question that really matters to me,” Reyes said. “All I want to know is whether I was responsible for what happened to Hallie and her crew.”

“Yes, you were,” Jetanien said. The brusqueness of the statement caught Reyes off guard. Then the Chelon added, “You were their commanding officer—that makes you responsible for everything they did, and for the fate that they met. Does that make you culpable? No…. What’s done is one, Commodore. No one is asking you to take the blame.” Jetanien stepped toward the door, which slid open. He gestured toward it. “We’re asking you to help us find a glimmer of hope in this tragedy. We’re asking you to lead.”

Reyes nodded slowly and walked toward the door. As he passed the ambassador, he said quietly, “Thank you, Jetanien.”

Jetanien made his hushed reply as he followed Reyes into the corridor. “You’re welcome, Diego.”

Reyes didn’t visit the terrestrial enclosure very often. Official duties kept him inside his office or the operations center most of the time; occasionally, he saw the inside of a meeting room or made a late-night visit to Zeke or Rana’s quarters. Standing beside the spare, small podium, waiting for executive officer Cooper to introduce him, Reyes was overwhelmed by how large Vanguard’s “park” really was.

Seated on the bleachers that surrounded the athletic fields, and gathered on the sloping lawn behind the bleachers, were several hundred station personnel and civilian residents who had turned out to hear his memorial address this morning. At the back of the crowd was Lugok, the portly Klingon envoy.