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“He didn’t have a choice.”

“Oh, come off it! Don’t give me that military garbage, Esperanza, you’re not in Starfleet anymore, you don’t have to defend them.”

“What else were they supposed to do?” she asked with a calm that just infuriated Jorel more. “Give me some alternatives.”

“They didn’t have to do anything!”

“So they should let a president who was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Starfleet officers, thousands more Klingon warriors, and millions of Tezwans just go right on with what he was doing?”

That brought Jorel up short. He knew that going public with the knowledge wouldn’t have worked. The Klingons would have demanded retribution. At best, they would have had to turn Zife over to face trial in a Klingon court, which would have resulted in his execution. That was not something the Federation could have allowed to happen to one of their leaders, and it would have damaged Klingon-Federation relations at a time when the alliance had already been pretty frayed. “So Starfleet engages in a coup d’etat, and they get away with it?”

“First of all, it wasn’t a coup d’etat-in order for that to be the case, they’d have had to take over the government. They stopped a war, got a criminal off the fifteenth floor, and allowed the constitutional process to play out as spelled out in the Articles of the Federation. President Bacco was elected, not appointed.”

Jorel sat back down. “What am I supposed to tell Ozla?”

Esperanza sighed. “Remind her of the consequences of her going public with this.”

“She already knows that. She’s going to run it anyway. And honestly, I don’t blame her. Hell, right now, I’m tempted to encourage her to run it.”

Speaking as if Jorel hadn’t said anything, Esperanza said, “If that doesn’t work, see what you can offer her in exchange. Reporters often have information they won’t print because of its volatile nature. If she does understand the consequences like you said-maybe she’ll trade it for something else.”

“Like what?”

“Ask her.”

Jorel knew Esperanza was right. Not all reporters were idiots, though it certainly seemed that way to Jorel half the time, and Ozla in particular wasn’t. She wouldn’t send the Federation into a war with the Klingons and tarnish the office of the president so readily, especially if she could use it to get something else.

However, there was one other concern. “What if there isn’t anything she wants-or if it’s something we can’t give her?”

“Then she runs the story and we face the consequences. Freedom of the press means just that-they’re free to do what they want. We can give them incentives not to say something in particular, but it’s their choice to accept or decline them. We cannot get into the business of exerting undue influence, or we stop being the Federation and become-I don’t know, something else, but not this.” She looked Jorel right in the eye. “Not what so many people died for.”

Jorel suddenly shivered.

Frowning, Esperanza asked, “What?”

“Nothing, I was just- ” He shook his head. “About twenty years ago on Bajor, I helped run an underground newsfeed. We used to piggyback on the official Cardassian channels and send out bits of news about the resistance and messages of hope and prayer and citations of specific instances of gross oppression.”

Esperanza chuckled mirthlessly. “Wasn’t the entire occupation gross oppression?”

Rolling his eyes, Jorel said, “The more extreme examples. Can I tell my story please?”

“Sure.” Esperanza made a “go-ahead” gesture.

“One time, we heard that the resistance was targeting a food storage unit, because the Cardassians were using it as a weapons depot as well. They probably figured that terrorists wouldn’t target food. We ran one of our feeds and talked about how stupid the Cardassians were for thinking the resistance was so easy to manipulate and how those weapons weren’t long for the world.” Jorel closed his eyes. He hadn’t thought about this in years, and he had no great desire to think about it now, but Ozla’s demand, as well as Esperanza’s confirmation of his worst fears, brought it slamming