Friday, July 25, 2155
Enterprise NX-01, Gamma Hydra sector
THE READY ROOM DOOR CHIME buzzed like an ugly accusation.
Jonathan Archer tossed the padd he’d been reading toward the top of his desk. It landed squarely on the cockeyed stack of paper printouts that had accumulated between his computer terminal and a framed photograph of Trip Tucker and himself, taken years ago during a fishing junket in the Gulf of Mexico. Though he wasn’t eager to speak with anyone at the moment, he felt grateful for any opportunity to postpone dealing with the padd’s contents, or the other paperwork beneath it.
“Come,” he said after jabbing a thumb at the desktop intercom beside the stack. The door opened a moment later with a faint pneumatic hiss.
Commander T’Pol stepped across the raised threshold, her Vulcan features as impassive as ever, her hands behind her back. Immediately behind her was Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, who carried himself far more tensely than T’Pol did; his demeanor was that of a man tiptoeing across a minefield.
The door closed behind his visitors, and Archer swiveled his desk chair toward them without making any move to rise.
“T’Pol. Malcolm. What can I do for you?”
“We haven’t come to make any specific request of you, Captain,” T’Pol said, then glanced briefly in Malcolm’s direction.
Reed cleared his throat. “Actually, Captain, we came to see if there’s anything we can do for you.” He looked as though he’d have preferred to be inventorying the armory’s stock of photonic torpedoes or rewiring his tactical console to having this conversation.
Not again, Archer thought, trying to keep his all but omnipresent frustration out of his voice. “All right, Malcolm. I appreciate the sentiment. Really. But I think I’ve already been getting quite enough of that sort of thing from Phlox, thank you. The last thing I need right now is my senior officers... nursemaiding me.”
Now Reed looked as embarrassed as T’Pol looked perplexed, his English reserve standing out in such sharp relief against the executive officer’s Vulcan stoicism that Archer almost succumbed to an urge to chuckle.
Almost.
“Captain, it’s been three days since the, ah, incident with the Kobayashi Maru,” Malcolm said, apparently mastering his discomfiture, if only barely. “But we’ve hardly caught a glimpse of you in all that time.”
Archer felt a scowl coming on, and decided not to try to stop it. “A captain has to keep a certain distance between himself and his crew. You both know that.”
Reed and T’Pol paused to exchange another quick but significant glance before they both trained their gazes back upon Archer in an ocular crossfire of concern.
“Captain, may we speak freely?” T’Pol said.
“Of course,” Archer said, leaning back in his chair.
T’Pol raised an eyebrow at Malcolm, who then picked up the figurative talking stick, though not without some apparent reluctance.
“We understand that a captain needs to keep his professional distance,” said the tactical officer. “But we don’t think he can afford to become a complete recluse either.”
Archer nodded. “All right. Noted. I’ll try to make a little more time to walk the decks before we reach the Tarod IX outpost. By the time we get there everybody aboard this ship will be far too busy to waste their energies fretting about my delicate feelings, anyway.”
Malcolm looked relieved. “Thank you, Captain.”
“No problem. You both worry too much. What’s our ETA at Tarod IX, anyway?”
“We will enter sector thirty of Coalition space in a little less than twenty-four hours on our present heading, Captain,” T’Pol said. “The Tarod system lies approximately two hours inside the region.”
“And we’re already prepared to receive refugees and wounded from the Tarod outpost,” said Reed.
Archer nodded again, feeling the muscles in his jaw beginning to harden. Prepared. If I was really prepared, we might have made it to Tarod IX before the goddamned Romulans attacked.
And the crew of the Kobayashi Maru might not be part of a floating debris cloud right now.
It was the same thought he’d had every time he’d made eye contact with Travis Mayweather over the past three days. Enterprise’s young helmsman had grown up on the Horizon, an Earth Cargo Service freighter that was very much like the Kobayashi Maru—and might well have met a similarly unhappy end a week or more ago. Although no wreckage from the Horizon had yet turned up anywhere along her route, the ambiguous nature of the Mayweather family vessel’s disappearance nevertheless gave Travis’s gaze a vague air of silent, sullen accusation.
Of course, the ensign’s eyes weren’t the only ones aboard that seemed focused in summary judgment of Archer’s failings, real or perceived. He couldn’t help but notice the whispers. And the earnest, quiet conversations that abruptly ceased whenever he entered one of the ship’s common areas.
Places he’d since begun studiously avoiding as much as possible, perhaps before he’d even realized he was doing it.
Archer suddenly noticed Malcolm regarding him with an expression that commingled sympathy with puzzlement.
“Sir?” Reed said.
“Yes, Malcolm?”
The weapons officer reddened noticeably.
“You said something about not being able to look Ensign Mayweather in the eye anymore,” T’Pol said quietly, an expression of quiet understanding replacing her earlier perplexity.
Christ, Archer thought. Now I’m mumbling to myself.
“I assume—” T’Pol said, interrupting herself momentarily to exchange another quick glance with Reed. Again facing Archer, she continued: “We assume that you are still blaming yourself for what happened to the E.C.S. Kobayashi Maru.”
“Admiral Gardner himself told the news services that you didn’t have a choice in the matter,” Malcolm said. “You had to save Enterprise. You had to save your crew. Everyone on Earth understands that by now.”
But I should have found a way to save the Maru, too, Archer thought. You can’t convince me that everybody on Earth isn’t also saying that under their breath.
“Captain,” T’Pol said, “We all understand that if you had stayed to fight off the hostiles that were attacking the freighter, they would have used their new weapon to seize Enterprise by remote control.”
Malcolm nodded enthusiastically. “And nobody needs to tell you what would have happened after that.”
“That doesn’t change anything for the people aboard the Maru,” Archer said. Although he understood that a remotely hijacked Enterprise would almost certainly have become a deadly weapon in the hands of the freighter’s destroyers—people who could have used his ship to destroy countless other Earth vessels, and doubtless also would have reverse engineered Earth’s most advanced propulsion and weapons technologies—none of it made any difference to Archer, at least not emotionally.
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get the plaintive memory of the last words of the Kobayashi Maru’s Captain Kojiro Vance out of his head.
“Vance begged me to save his ship and his crew,” Archer said. “And I failed him.”
“You didn’t have a choice, sir,” Reed said.
“It was a no-win scenario, Jonathan,” said T’Pol. Her use of his first name was almost startling, a sign that his first officer was doing her utmost to reach him on a purely emotional level despite her devotion to her Vulcan principles.
Archer raised his hands in a gentle warding-off gesture, directed at his officers. “All right. Message received. Thank you. Like I said, I will bolster crew morale by walking the decks at my first opportunity.” He paused to rub his chin, and noticed for the first time just how scratchy his jawline had become over the past three days. Summoning up a smile that he hoped would convince them both that their work here was done, he added, “I’ll even shave first so as not to scare the horses. Now get back to work before I tell Phlox you’ve been working his side of the street.”
Reed returned Archer’s smile, albeit at somewhat lower wattage, before exiting the ready room and leaving Archer alone with T’Pol.
“That goes for you, too, T’Pol,” Archer said. “Really, I’m fine.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I believe I have lived among humans long enough to know when they are... shading the truth. You are still in turmoil.”
A tart rejoinder about minding one’s own business sprang to his lips, but he bit it back. She was his executive officer, and his business was hers as well—especially when so much of it was personal, and shared by them both.
“Trip,” he said at length.
T’Pol’s perplexed expression abruptly returned. “Pardon me, Captain?”
“I can’t help but wonder if I would have found a way to save both Enterprise and the Maru if Trip were still here.”
She nodded as understanding appeared to dawn on her. “I see.”
“If you weren’t a Vulcan, I probably wouldn’t have admitted that to you. The last person I’d want to offend is my exec.”
“But I am Vulcan, Captain. Therefore I take no offense. But I do understand how valuable the relationship is to you.”
Archer felt his eyebrows go aloft. “ ‘Is’? Present tense, T’Pol? I’d say there’s a pretty damned good chance that Trip is dead. For real this time, I mean.”
T’Pol shook her head. “I am confident that I would know it if Commander Tucker were dead.”
“It is an empirical fact. As is the fact that Trip’s absence is not the only thing distressing you.”
She nodded in the direction of the uneven stack of paperwork on his desk and the padd that lay across the top, its display still showing the document he had been reading when she and Malcolm had entered the ready room.
He reached across his desk, picked up the padd, and rose from his chair. “T’Pol, you and Malcolm have both put a lot of energy into vindicating my decision to leave the Maru behind. But not everyone on this ship feels the way you do. Over the past three days I’ve received fifteen formal transfer requests. So far.”
T’Pol nodded slowly. “I am aware that some members of the crew are... uncomfortable with the outcome of the Kobayashi Maru affair. Unfortunately, some of those individuals have decided to apply for reassignment.”
Archer scrolled the padd’s display until it showed the names of the authors of the two most recent reassignment requests, then handed the device to T’Pol. Although her Vulcan demeanor was usually as impermeable as Enterprise’s hull plating when polarized, T’Pol’s eyes widened in incredulity when she saw the names.
“You must not have been aware that Travis Mayweather and Hoshi Sato have just joined the ranks of the uncomfortable,” Archer said. “Dismissed, Commander.”
Holding the padd, T’Pol quietly exited the ready room, leaving Archer alone with his thoughts. He sat heavily in his chair and picked up the framed photograph, ignoring the stack of papers beside it as it tipped over, partially spilling onto the deck. Trip Tucker was holding a duranium-reinforced fishing rod in one hand, with his other arm around Archer’s shoulders. A huge marlin, Trip’s catch of the day, hung above the pier in the background.
Good times. Simpler times. Far better times than these.
I saved my crew, he thought. But at what cost?