San Francisco, Earth
KEISHA NAQUASE ROLLED OVER IN BED, gathering the sheets around her. “So the Vulcans plan to patrol two whole solar systems with some sort of... burglar alarm system?”
“I shouldn’t have told you any of this,” the man said, rolling over beside her and propping himself up on one elbow. “Just forget I said anything about it, okay?”
Naquase got out of bed and began searching the floor for her garments, which were strewn about along with the components of the man’s blue Starfleet uniform, coverall here, boots and undergarments there. The lights weren’t on, but the morning sunlight that filtered through the gauzy drapes made them unnecessary.
“Uh-uh. Sorry,” she said, dressing hastily as she began mentally composing the story she was going to file. “I’m more than happy to oblige you in a lot of other ways, dear heart, but I’m afraid that silence simply isn’t among them.”
Gannet Brooks marched right past the intern’s cubicle and straight into Nash McEvoy’s office. Standing over her editor’s cluttered desk, she cleared her throat loudly when he didn’t look up immediately from the writing padd on which he was working.
“Shouldn’t you be on your way to the spaceport already?” McEvoy said a few heartbeats later, blinking at her in surprise over the top of his thin transparent aluminum glasses. “You’re risking letting your next interview victim escape all the way to Mars.”
“I don’t have to leave for another hour. The spaceport’s in New Mexico, not New Berlin,” Brooks said impatiently, then tossed her own padd onto the small piles of printout flimsies that adorned McEvoy’s desk. “Looks like Keisha Naquase has scooped me yet again. Nash, why didn’t you warn me you were going to run this?”
She jabbed a finger toward the padd that sat between them on the desktop, where it mutely displayed the headline VULCAN DEFENSE PLAN FALLS FAR SHORT.
“I guess I’m just not in the habit of reporting to my reporters, Gannet,” McEvoy said in a faintly scolding tone. “The question you ought to be asking is why you seem so surprised to learn that Vulcan’s only contribution to the defense of the entire human species is a pair of interplanetary burglar alarms.”
“They’re actually fairly complex networks of long-range sensors, if you want to get technical,” Brooks said. “It might even work.”
“So why didn’t I see a piece from you about that?” McEvoy asked, spreading his hands in a gesture that looked like a calculated display of helplessness.
“Because unlike some correspondents I could name, I like to confirm my facts before I run with a piece. I couldn’t get anything solid about exactly what went on during that closed-door Coalition delegate meeting yesterday, only hearsay.”
“I suppose that’s why they call things like that ‘closed door meetings,’” McEvoy deadpanned, scratching the bridge of his long nose. “Looks like Naquase found a way through the shroud of official secrecy that you somehow missed.”
“Or maybe she just decided that running with the hearsay was good enough,” Brooks said, trying and failing to keep the disdain she felt out of her voice. “It wouldn’t be the first time, you know. Like that completely unfair hatchet piece she did last week about Captain Archer.”
McEvoy scowled and held up a hand, either to call for silence or to ward off a blow he feared might be coming. “Hey, I approved that piece, remember?”
“Nobody’s judgment is perfect, Nash,” she said, hoping to cushion her words somewhat by affecting an I’m-joking-but-not-really grin. “Not even yours.”
“Rubber and glue, kiddo. Besides, Naquase’s perspective on Archer was entirely fair. Did he or did he not order Enterprise to flee from the Gamma Hydra sector, leaving a civilian freighter crew to die?”
“We still don’t know what actually happened, Nash,” she said. “I’d bet my life that the real truth is a little bit more complicated than the raw red meat Naquase served up.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. But certainly not in the eyes of the public. You ought to understand that by now.”
She paused for the space of time it took to count slowly to five. “I understand that it’s a reporter’s job to try to get the public eye focused somewhere above crotch-level. You ought to understand that by now.”
He leaned back in his chair, which creaked loudly in protest. “Oh, please, Gannet. Is this a harangue about journalistic ethics now? I thought you were pissed off about being scooped.”
“I am pissed off about being scooped!”
“Look, you’ve scooped Naquase at least as often as she’s scooped you. You know how these things work. Sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you.”
“I’m trying to enjoy a nice, steaming mad-on here, Nash. Please don’t wreck that by trying to be encouraging.”
He shrugged again. “All right. Then let’s get back to the journalistic ethics thing. Don’t you suppose that Vulcan’s local diplomatic service would have already issued an official denial by now if Naquase’s reporting was really as sloppy as you think it is?”
Brooks nodded, though only grudgingly. “She’d just better have one hell of a holovid prepared for tonight at eleven to back this up. Especially if she expects to keep her audience focused on the lemons instead of how to make ’em into lemonade.”
McEvoy’s brow crinkled in a show of confusion. “So you’re a food writer now, too? What are you talking about?”
She counted slowly to five once again before replying. “I’m talking about how you and Naquase both always seem to advocate retreat.”
He blinked at her uncomprehendingly. “Retreat?”
All right, Nash, she thought. You asked for it.
Aloud, she said. “Yes, retreat. Naquase has never been the same since the Xindi attack, and I think you’ve let it affect you a hell of a lot more than you’re willing to admit.”
He glanced down at his wrist chronometer. “Don’t you have a jump-pod to catch?”
“Don’t try to distract me. Naquase’s pieces always say in a thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways that humanity had better keep its collective head down in order to avoid bringing still more wrath down from the heavens. Now, I’m not going to try to convince anybody that the Vulcans have covered themselves in glory so far during this Romulan crisis, because they haven’t. But I’ve spent enough time reporting from the final frontier to know that trying to run away from what’s out there is no solution.”
“Even when what’s out there absolutely scares the crap out of you?” McEvoy said. “Even when the big brother you thought had your back ditches you when the school bully comes looking for a fight?”
She grinned again, but this time it felt a little more genuine. “Especially then.”
He looked thoughtful for a moment, then straightened in his chair. But instead of going from there straight into a defensive rant, he surprised her.
“You’re right,” he said quietly, looking down at the padd on his desk. “I am scared. Damned scared. Maybe more scared than I’ve ever been in my entire life. I probably felt that way even before the Xindi attack, which might be why I never left Earth, even for a vacation trip.”
Brooks nodded. She strongly suspected that Naquase, who had never ventured any farther from Earth than Lake Armstrong on Luna, felt precisely the same way, even if she would never admit it to a rival reporter.
“But I also recognize that not everybody feels the same way I do,” McEvoy said, still staring broodingly at the padd. “And I’m grateful that at least some people are willing to go out and meet whatever scariness is out there head-on.” He looked up at her then, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose so that his gray eyes looked almost cartoonishly large. “People like that guy you told me you got involved with for a while on Draylax. The one who later got a piloting job on Enterprise under Archer.”
“Travis Mayweather,” she murmured.
She conjured a fond memory of the easy smile of her old flame, with whom she had renewed her acquaintance just six months ago, though with bittersweet if unsurprisingly impermanent results. Brooks had first met Travis around a decade before that, during one of the E.C.S. Horizon’s many brief stopovers on one of the frontier planets she had been writing about at the time. She had noticed right away that they both possessed a kindred wanderlust, though that very trait they held in common could only pull them in different directions, literally putting a light-years-deep gulf between them. And Shakespeare thought he knew all about star-crossed lovers.
Awareness suddenly returned to Brooks that Nash McEvoy was still talking. “But mostly,” he was saying, “I’m glad that people like you aren’t afraid of what’s out there, in the Deep Dark Big Bad. Because that’s why I chose you. But if anything happens to you because I sent you out there...”
As he choked audibly and trailed off, Brooks nodded, his unexpectedly sincere and sober tone taking her by surprise. While she had always acknowledged the mortal danger that might await her during her imminent outbound tour of humanity’s interstellar frontier zones—some of which had already become hot spots in Earth’s rapidly escalating conflict with the so-called Romulan Star Empire—she had been looking forward to her departure with far more anticipation than fear. It had simply never occurred to her that her editor might feel only fear on her behalf.
McEvoy’s voice returned, gathering just enough strength to let him say, “Maybe you’ll come to your senses and come back here where it’s safe during your first layover at Bradbury Spaceport.” His eyes looked huge and moist, and it wasn’t because of the glasses.
“Hey, Nash,” she said, trying to sound encouraging. “If we don’t get out there into space and get our arms and heads around whatever dangers might be waiting for us out there, then whatever Big Bad we might be hiding from now will eventually come to us.”
She glanced at her own wrist chronometer. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a hopper to catch and an interview to conduct.”
As she exited Nash McEvoy’s office, she wondered if her editor’s vivid imagination and worrywart tendencies might inflict far more terror upon him than anything she was likely to encounter out on the far fringes of human habitation.
But somehow she tended to doubt it.