Vanguard,BookOne

by David Mack

  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.”

  “I know.”

  She turned his chin upward so that he was looking her in the eye. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m functioning,” he said. “But I’m not happy about it.”

  “You should take some time off. Go back to Luna and see your family. I’m sure they’d love to see you.”

  “Some of them, maybe,” Reyes said. Noting her stare of gentle reproach, he added, “It’s eight weeks there and eight weeks back. Starfleet’s not going to grant me a four-month bereavement leave…. I asked.”

  Stroking her fingers through the gray brush-cut behind his receding hairline, Desai said, “I’m sorry, Diego.”

  “Nothing to be done about it.” He added with a rueful grin, “I knew space was a big place when I took this job.”

  “It just seems unfair, is all,” she said.

  “Sure it is—but what isn’t?” Reyes reached forward and picked up the bottle of wine on the table. He examined the label. “The ’51 Brunello Riserva,” he said. “Very nice.”

  “It was that or the Chateauneuf-du-Pape ’41,” Desai said. “But I figured with tandoori chicken—”

  “You made the right choice.” He untangled her arms from his neck and gently kissed the palm of her left hand. “And so did I, when I fell for you.”

  She perched on his left thigh, half-lit in the candlelight. “Does thinking about her make it better or worse?”

  “I’m not sure.” Reaching his arms around her, he began tearing the foil off the bottle of wine. “Right now, the hurt doesn’t change much, whether I’m thinking about it or not. At this point, I have to make an effort not to think about her, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I was just wondering if focusing on good memories might help.” Lowering her head, she shook it in denial. “That’s foolish, I guess. Ignore me, I’m just a lawyer—I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “Thinking good thoughts probably can’t be any worse than beating myself up for not being there,” he said. “Hand me the bottle opener?” Desai leaned over and grabbed the small air-needle cork remover, then handed it to Reyes, who pushed it through the cork and began carefully pumping air into the tiny pocket of space beneath it. “It’s funny, but ever since I learned Mom was sick, I’ve been fixated on a Spanish lullaby she used to sing to me when I was a boy.” The cork popped free. He set it aside and gestured to Desai to snag a pair of glasses. “She only kind of sung it—her voice when she was putting me to bed was half a whisper. I don’t even remember the words anymore…just the sound of it. A song sung just for me.”

  “Do you even remember what it was called?”

  “No idea,” Reyes said. “Mom used to talk about teaching it to Jeanne, but somehow there was just never time.”

  “Well, you were only married to her for eleven years,” Desai teased. “You think these things happen overnight?”

  “I think Mom was just waiting for me and Jeanne to have kids. If Jeanne had gotten pregnant, I think she and Mom would’ve found the time.” At the mention of children and pregnancy, Reyes noticed that Desai looked away, subtly distancing herself from the topic. He wondered if there was something in Desai’s past that made it a sore point. Closing the subject, he said, “Anyway, I doubt my father would know what the song was. He was never much for sentimentalism.”

  Desai put the two glasses within easy reach. One at a time, he tipped each glass at a slight angle and filled its lower third with the deep-crimson, complexly aromatic Montalcino. He handed one glass to Desai and lifted the other for a toast. “To those who are gone but never forgotten.” Their glasses clinked with a delicate chiming sound, and he savored the layers of flavor in the wine. Desai finished her sip first, then reached down and picked up his notes for the memorial address.

  “For tomorrow?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I presided over a couple funerals aboard the Dauntless,” he said, “but paying respects for an entire ship and her crew…that’s a duty I haven’t had before.”

  She put down his notes. “I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

  “It’s not my speech I’m worried about,” he said. “Tomorrow I’m going to say a lot of high-minded things about courage, and justice, and why we’re all out here risking our lives. It’s going to be inspiring, if I say so myself.” He took another long sip of his wine. “I just want to convince myself it’s as true as I’m saying it is.”

  Desai kissed him tenderly on the lips, then touched her forehead to his. “You will,” she said. “You made a believer out of me, and I’m a lawyer—I don’t trust anybody.”

  Tim Pennington wasn’t sober yet. It had been nearly four hours since he was evicted from his own apartment. The warm numbness of his buzz had passed, however, leaving behind only severe halitosis and the woozy feeling of walking on rubber legs.

  He lingered on Fontana Meadow, listening to the gurgling of the fountain and wallowing in the solitude. Then the dome of artificial sky rapidly brightened with a new ersatz dawn. Alpha shift would start soon. Station personnel would report to their regular duty stations.

  That’s my cue. He headed for the turbolift.

  Minutes later he stepped off on to level five, near the station core. He found the office he was looking for, then sequestered himself in a small maintenance nook a few meters away. Standing with his back to the wall, he faced the door and waited, taking shallow breaths and listening for footsteps.

  Precisely fifteen seconds before 0800, he heard the crisp clack of boot heels on metal deck flooring. He held his breath.

  T’Prynn arrived at the door and entered a security code on the digital keypad next to it. The door opened. She stepped halfway in, then paused in the doorway. With her back still turned to him, she said, “Are you coming in, Mr. Pennington?”

  So much for the element of surprise.

  Prying himself out of his corner, he plodded toward her office. She stepped in and waited on the other side of the door until he was close enough for the sensor to hold it for him. He hesitated, then dragged himself inside.

  Even before the door closed, the heavier gravity pulled his feet to the deck. Dry heat attacked his skin like a hydrophage. The inside of her office was mostly dark, just a few spills of red light on the walls and a harsh white overhead above her desk. Like many other Vulcans whose rank afforded them such privileges, T’Prynn had altered the environmental settings of her personal workspace and, Pennington assumed, her living quarters to emulate the climate and gravity of her native Vulcan.

  It took him a few moments to acclimate himself to the new conditions. T’Prynn used the time to take a seat behind her austere, curved desk. She sat in a relaxed pose, resting her arms at her sides. Aloof and apparently unfazed by his impromptu appearance on her doorstep, her voice was as seductively husky as it was cold. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

  “I came to say…‘Congratulations.’ ”

  One eyebrow lifted, turning her mien curious. “For what?”

  “Don’t be so modest,” he said, laying bare his sarcasm. “Taking all that real intelligence and dressing it up to look fake? That was brilliant.” Without betraying any reaction, she got up from her chair. He pressed on. “Reeling me in with the anonymous tip? Nice touch.” T’Prynn unlocked a wall panel for a narrow storage compartment as Pennington’s rant gained momentum. “Oh, but your masterpiece—your pièce de résistance—had to be making up an entire person to vouch for all t
hose lies, so that I’d have someone to trust.” She glanced at him as she opened the panel. His spiel built toward a crescendo. “What utter genius! Sending me a walking, breathing, flesh-and-blood lie to convince me that all the other lies are true…I confess, Commander, my hat’s off to—”

  She pulled a familiar-looking duffel bag from the storage nook and tossed it in a clanking heap at Pennington’s feet. “One of the facts of life aboard a brand-new starbase,” she said, walking back to her desk, “is that not all the onboard systems are fully functional right away. Like the garbage incinerators, for instance.”

  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.

  Standing together in the front row before the podium were the senior members of the clergy who resided on the station: Father McKee from the nondenominational Christian chapel; Rabbi Geller; Imam al-Jazaar; Brother Sihanouk from the Buddhist temple; Zharran sh’Rassa, from the Andorian eresh’tha; and Gom glasch Moar, the resident Tellarite throg, or “sin eater.”

  Speaking to large groups was one of the few things that still made Reyes sick to his stomach with anxiety. He took a slow, deep breath and checked for the fifty-third time that his notes were still secure in his hand.

  Less than a minute before 1100, Commander Cooper emerged from the standing crowd around the podium, nodded to Reyes, and walked up the three stairs onto the raised platform. He moved to the lectern, switched on a small microphone sensor, and cleared his throat. “Good morning. Please rise.” The crowd rose from its seats or from the lawn. The Starfleet personnel in the audience stood at attention, and a respectful hush settled over the throng. Cooper nodded to Reyes, then looked back at the crowd. “Please welcome Commodore Reyes.”

  Polite, muted applause greeted Reyes as he ascended the stairs. Cooper yielded the lectern to him then stepped off the podium, leaving Reyes as the sole focus of attention. Reyes glanced at his first note card, then wondered why he had brought them; he was too nervous to make sense of what he had written. He turned the cards facedown on the lectern, drew a breath, and looked out at the small sea of faces that surrounded him.

  “Thank you Commander Cooper,” he began. “Fellow Starfleet officers; enlisted personnel; civilian residents; and honored guests; thank you for being here this morning.

  “Today, I stand with you in grief. I mourn with you. Like many of you…perhaps all of you…I lost someone I knew aboard the Bombay…. A friend…. For five years, before she was the Bombay’s CO, Hallie Gannon was my first officer aboard the Starship Dauntless. From her first day aboard she was everything a captain could ask for in a number one; tireless, efficient, always ready to take on one more job. When she took command of the Bombay, I knew her crew had scored a lucky break.