What Judgments Come

I’m betting not all that much.

“So, we’ve got the Tholians mad at the Klingons,” Nogura said, “and the Klingons mad or getting ready to be mad at the Tholians, and the Klingons and the Romulans all mad at us. Pretty good, I’d say, for not even being lunchtime yet.”

“What about the Tholians?” Okagawa asked.

Nogura waved away the question. “They were already mad at us. That just leaves the Shedai, and with the luck we’ve been having, they may be on their way here right now.”

There was no way to know what had become of the Shedai entity that had escaped from confinement inside the Mirdonyae Artifact and wrecked the Lovell. The brief contact Xiong and Mahmud al-Khaled had achieved with the creature had yielded little in the way of useful information. The two officers, along with Doctor Carol Marcus, believed that with communication now possible with the entities and if some measure of control could be put in place, some sort of dialogue and negotiation might be feasible. If nothing else, the link at least provided one of the best new avenues of research into the mysterious Shedai that had been discovered since Operation Vanguard’s inception.

All of which might not matter, Nogura reminded himself, given Xiong’s other theory: that the escaped Shedai entity had fled somewhere to regroup, or regain whatever energy it had lost while being held prisoner. The lieutenant had also put forth the unpleasant hypothesis that the Shedai might well be seeking out others of its own kind.

“What if that thing decides to come back?” Okagawa asked. “What if, God help us, it decides to bring friends?”

Reminded of the power just one of these creatures possessed during its attack on the station and the Lovell,and knowing from mission reports what a group of the aliens could do if provoked, Nogura had only one answer. “If we don’t or can’t find anything useful in the Eremar system, then we’re probably going to need God’s help.”

39

Hospitals. Reyes had always hated them.

He had avoided them as best he could throughout his life, and even on those few occasions where he had entered one as a patient, he had done his level best to ensure that his stay was as brief as possible. Although logic reminded him that he should know better and that hospitals generally were dedicated to the preservation of life, he still tended to think of them as places where people went to die, or at the very least to emerge as somehow worse off than when they entered. His dislike went back to one of the more unpleasant memories from his childhood, when his parents would take him to visit his maternal grandmother at a hospice where she had spent the final months of her life suffering from an incurable blood disease. Seeing her, withered and fading with each passing day, had become almost too much to bear, but young Diego Reyes had put on a brave front out of consideration for his mother, maintaining it throughout his grandmother’s funeral and his mother’s mourning. In the years that followed, his choice of career had seen to it that he had spent more than a bit of time calling on sick or injured loved ones and friends confined in such places, and one of Reyes’s deepest regrets was that he had been unable to make the transit to the Sol system to be by his mother’s side when she too had contracted a mortal illness.

Thankfully, his visit to Vanguard’s hospital was with the knowledge that the person upon whom he was calling would soon walk out of here under his own power and one day resume the life that had been so harshly interrupted by one moment’s selfless act.

“They told me you were coming for a visit,” Tim Pe

Reyes shrugged. “Doesn’t seem to be doing much good, anyway. I thought Zeke was going to fix your face while he had you here.”

“How do you improve on perfection?” Pe

Nodding in appreciation, Reyes replied, “You’ll get there, Tim.” Though the prosthetic was all but identical to the arm he had lost, Pe

“Damned right, I will,” the journalist said as he returned the carafe to its place on the bureau. “I mean, I’m still bloody well right-handed, you know.” Looking down at the replacement arm, most of which was concealed by the long sleeve of his hospital shirt, he held up the artificial hand, which to Reyes looked real enough. He noted that Pe

For some reason, Reyes found that fu

Shifting again in the bed, Pe

Reyes glanced over his shoulder to confirm that the security officers were not amused by the remark. “They dohave phasers, Tim.”

“Yes, they do,” Pe

Nodding, Reyes replied, “That’s right. Starfleet’s finally figured out what they want to do with me.”

“Bastards,” Pe

“Nogura did everything he could,” Reyes replied, choosing his words with care. “I can’t say I disagree with Starfleet’s decision.”

It was not a lie so much as an artful navigation of the truth. Nogura had in fact been a staunch advocate for Reyes, convincing Starfleet Command to commute his sentence in recognition for the services he had provided while aboard the Omari-Ekon. However, the admiralty and JAG Headquarters had been unwilling to overturn Reyes’s court-martial conviction. In exchange for the leniency they had decided to show by not sending him to the New Zealand Penal Settlement, Reyes had agreed to go into permanent exile. His life would be comfortable and he would be able to enjoy his retirement at some quiet, undisclosed location where every effort would be made to ensure his new identity afforded him a degree of freedom and anonymity. There would be no official record of his final disposition, save for a classified file at Starfleet Headquarters. Like most of the documentation pertaining to Operation Vanguard, it would be buried under multiple levels of security and all but impossible to retrieve save for those few individuals who would possess the necessary authorization and “need to know.” So far as the rest of the galaxy was concerned, Diego Reyes would cease to exist.