“You’re not that bad.”
“Sure I am.”
“El’nor, I can think of at least three or four people I’ve met in this life who are worse than you.”
“That many?”
“How much do you know about the DTI?”
“The Department of Temporal Investigations? Nothing. And I’d just as soon keep it that way.”
“Too bad. It occurred to me after the last time we spoke that turning my career or the admiral’s over to their tender mercies might not be the best idea without gaining a more thorough understanding of their policies and agendas.”
Sal chuckled. “You’ve been calling in favors, haven’t you?”
“Only about a dozen,” Farkas admitted. “I still have enough friends at Command who are willing to speak freely that I have been able to cobble together a rather troubling dossier on our friendly local time police.”
“If they don’t already call themselves that, they should,” Sal said. “That right there is good branding. Even I wouldn’t mind a visit from my friendly local time cop.”
“I confess, I have never before really considered the issue. I assumed that if you were part of the Federation government, you were probably going to be on the right side of most arguments.”
“They’re not?”
“We’ll never really know,” Farkas replied. “They are, to my knowledge, the only organization with the authority to commandeer Starfleet vessels and override the chain of command, even, when they deem it necessary, the C-in-C, without so much as a shred of oversight.”
“That makes it sound like we all work for them,” Sal said, troubled.
“Not on paper, but in practice, it appears so.”
“Well, I don’t know about you, but that’s something I would definitely want to lodge a complaint with the management about.”
“They don’t even have to tell us why they are ordering us to proceed in whatever manner they see fit. In every instance where they have intervened with officers I know personally, officers who are then sworn to absolute silence, no matter how pear-shaped any of these missions go, Starfleet is required to defer to their authority. They may be experts in temporal mechanics, but none of them are trained in the finer points of command. Fear seems to drive every choice they make, and they are, essentially, a law unto themselves.”
“Next time, I’m picking the bedtime story.”
“Sorry.”
“Have you heard from Dulmur again?”
“No. I scared him off. And I don’t regret it. But I’m also willing to bet we haven’t heard from them for the last time.”
“I don’t know our admiral as well as you do, but I can’t see her bending to the will of a bunch of folks back home no matter what the regulations say.”
“I can’t either. Which means it won’t be up to her. It will be up to me. I’m the next officer they will tap to follow their orders.”
“You want a note from your doctor? I regret to inform you that Regina Farkas is unable to captain today.”
“Then it will fall to Roach. Or Tom Paris.”
“They’ll end up with a mutiny on their hands.”
Farkas smiled ruefully. “But what if they’re right? They don’t have to tell us everything. They don’t have to tell us anything other than where to go and what to do. And the oath I swore demands that I agree, no matter what. I hate it on principle, but what if they do know something we don’t that makes my obstinance the worst possible choice?”
Sal did her the credit of seriously considering the question. “Here’s the thing about people who are right, at least in my experience, and I’m including myself in this. They usually don’t have a problem sharing the facts that support their argument. Folks who won’t… those are the ones you need to worry about.”
“Time will tell, I suppose.”
“Oh, come on, Regina. You can do better than that.”
VOYAGER
Ensign Aytar Gwyn was not sleeping well. She rarely managed more than a few hours each night and those were shallow and fraught. Her duties had been relatively simple the past few weeks. Counselor Cambridge, with whom she had shared four unproductive sessions since he had confirmed her bond with Kim and Conlon’s child, had restricted her from bridge duty. She didn’t blame him. Waves of crippling anxiety washed over her regularly, definitely not optimal while flying a starship, even one that was essentially holding position. Running flight-control checks on Voyager’s shuttles and reviewing the conn reports of her fellow pilots comprised most of her waking hours.
It was good, in that it allowed her to spend at least half her day alone, focused on her connection to the child that had consumed her, a child that, by some reckonings, was hardly a person yet. Still largely a collection of very busy cells, this being’s continued existence had become as essential to Gwyn’s as her own. She wasn’t sure what would happen should she ever open the door in her heart that was now bound to another by an invisible string of light and purpose and find that tie severed. It was terrifying to contemplate, which accounted for the constant anxiety as well as her default moods of cranky and pissed as hell.
At first, the bonding had been such a positive experience. It had focused her and revealed internal depths of strength and compassion she had never known. And had Galen not been taken, had Gwyn been able to observe on a daily basis, even from a distance, the child of her heart’s continued growth and well-being, she might never have come to regret the choice she had made as powerfully as she did now. The state in which she found herself was simply unendurable. She was trapped in a relationship that should never have been formed, all because she had been so determined to rescue Devi Patel, she had never truly considered the consequences of her actions.
She had shared exactly none of this with the counselor. He hadn’t pushed her, which seemed odd, given that normally, he had absolutely no problem speaking his mind. He had simply accepted her brisk lies in response to
