Chapter 18

Chapter 18

The door chime sounded. Brett ignored it, taking another pull from his glass of beer. The last thing he needed right now was to be disturbed by Hurd, who’d probably want to press Brett for a more gracious thank you.

“Brett, it’s me. Can you open the door?” Robyn said.

At the sound of her voice, he staggered to the door and opened it to find her in not much better condition. Her eyes were red and wet, her hair tousled, and her uniform wrinkled. The last gave away her troubled state of mind more than anything else. No matter what else happened, Robyn would never let anyone see her in a wrinkled uniform.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said, stumbling past him into the room. From the smell of her breath, she clearly had her own supply of alcohol somewhere.

He steered her onto the chair and then put both hands on her shoulders. “Well, we do what we always do: we keep going with the mission.”

“I don’t understand it,” she said. “Why did they kill Goldberg and Slipowicz? They didn’t do anything to anyone. They only wanted to fix the warp core so it didn’t explode and hurt anyone.”

“They were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.

“I guess that could be said of all of us.”

He nodded. He’d certainly been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Only in his case it hadn’t been entirely by chance. The Serparnian Liberation Army paid off Ril to draw the Cassandra here. As for the Orion, the same fate would have befallen any Starfleet ship. They just drew the short straw in getting assigned to the mission.

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “You did everything you could to make sure no lives were lost.”

“Tell that to Goldberg and Slipowicz’s families. They won’t agree with you.”

“They were doing their duty.” He hoped these words would snap her out of the pit of self-pity she’d dug for herself.

Instead, she reached for his half-full glass of beer and drained it. Never in the time they’d known each other had he seen her drink like that, like him. She always said she hated the taste of alcohol, it didn’t agree with her stomach.

“Duty, right. That’s what they told me when Shawn died. He was doing his duty for the Federation. They draped a casket with the flag at the memorial service and people like my father talked about honor and duty and courage. The whole time I sat there looking at that casket and thinking to myself how empty it was, just a dress uniform.”

“Robyn—”

“We have fifty people lying in a freezer right now because of duty. That’s where it gets you in the end. Piled up in a freezer or blown to atoms.”

“When we put on this uniform, we take a risk. You know that. They knew that.”

“I never wanted this.” She motioned to the window. “I wanted to explore the universe. I wanted to help people. I never wanted anyone to die.”

“If that’s all you wanted then you should have enrolled in the science program and gotten yourself on a research station,” Brett said. He tightened his grip on Robyn’s shoulders to look her in the eye. “When you’re in command, you have to accept you will order people to their deaths. That’s what comes with the uniform.”

“Then maybe I don’t want the uniform anymore.” She moved her hands to unzip the uniform, but he stopped her. “Let me go. I never should have been in command of anything. You know that. My father knew that.”

“You can’t quit now just because things have gotten difficult. You can’t give up on these people. They believe in you. I believe in you.”

“I don’t care.”

He let her go. “Fine, go ahead and quit. But who are you going to turn the ship over to? Me? Ramirez? Ensign Merle? There’s no one nearly as qualified.” He turned to face the window. “You can think what you want, but you did everything right. You did everything I didn’t do. I killed thirty Serparnians because I panicked. You didn’t.”

“I was terrified,” she said. “I wanted to run away and hide. Don’t try to tell me how brave I was.”

“But you didn’t show it and that’s what matters. Don’t you think I was terrified during the war? I was scared out of my wits most of the time, but it doesn’t matter so long as everyone else believes you’re not afraid.”

Robyn stared at him for a moment until finally saying, “Thank you, Brett.” She stood up and took an unsteady step, pitching forward into his arms.

When he turned her over, he saw she’d fallen asleep. He gingerly carried her to the bed, setting her down on the mattress. Starfleet protocols forbade a captain from sleeping in a first officer’s bed, but in this case he thought it better than dragging the captain’s inert form through the corridors.

After setting her down, his hands lingered on her body. He thought of their final night together, feeling the soft skin hidden beneath the uniform. All those years apart he’d dreamed of having her in his bed again. But not like this. Not reeking of liquor, not with tears dried on her cheeks, tears for her husband as much for her fallen comrades.

He left her on the bed and locked the door behind him so no one would see her in such a condition. In the turbolift on his way to the bridge, he went over what had happened on the freighter. The hair on the back of his neck rose again. This time he knew what was causing it.

Why had they stationed the assassin on the freighter? Why plant the bodies in the first place? It was almost as if they wanted someone to come aboard the ship. But if they were going to blow it up, why bother with the effort?

The deeper he got into this, the less sense any of it made. The only to finding any answers would be to find the Serparnian warship and its captain. Even then, Brett doubted he would like the answers he received.