Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [111]
Perhaps half a minute later, she met his gaze squarely. “Well, I still have one major problem to deal with.” She reached toward the footlocker and grabbed the bourbon bottle and one of the empty drinking vessels. “And I don’t have a lot of good options open to me.”
Hayes rose from where he sat and gently took the bottle from Guitierrez, who put up no resistance.
He looked her straight in the eye. “Maybe you do, Selma. Maybe you don’t.
“But I’ll support whichever one you pick.”
Nineteen
SEATED AT THE CAPTAIN’S DINNER TABLE, Reed kept catching himself fidgeting, and continually had to force himself to keep his mind and hands focused on the shepherd’s pie that Chef had placed in front of him.
He glanced across the table at his two dinner companions. Though Mayweather looked tired, he ate his French onion soup with slurping gusto, betraying no outward sign of feeling out of place.
How does he manage to stay so cool in the captain’s mess? thought Reed, who rarely got summoned here, and always felt nervous on those rare occasions when he did. He found himself wondering just how many times the young pilot had already seen the inside of the room.
The third man present was the captain himself, who displayed no recognition of Reed’s discomfiture as he tore into a thick porterhouse steak, another one of the versatile chef’s apparently endless repertoire of culinary specialties. Every few bites, Archer would toss a chunk of meat to Porthos; the small, white-and-brown beagle was sitting attentively on the deck about a meter away from Archer’s left.
Despite the life-affirming presence of Porthos, however, the captain didn’t quite seem to be his normal ebullient self, doubtless in large part because of the double interment over which he’d just presided. And yet Reed knew that whatever was bothering Jonathan Archer this evening went even deeper than the grief and second-guessing that he must surely be experiencing in the aftermath of the loss of a valued crew member.
Reed knew that the captain’s troubles had been simmering toward a slow boil for the past several weeks, because he had witnessed Archer’s uncharacteristic flare-ups of temper on a number of recent occasions; one such incident had occurred about six weeks earlier, immediately before Archer had led that ill-starred expedition into the putrid trellium mines on Tulaw. Whenever the captain’s angry outbursts occurred, Reed had understood them to be natural consequences of the unprecedented levels of both responsibility and frustration that Starfleet had heaped on the captain. After all, it was likely that no ship’s commander had ever before been asked to shoulder such huge quantities of both—at least not until the current Xindi crisis had erupted.
But after Archer’s landing party had spirited La’an Trahve away from Kaletoo, the captain had stepped past the boundaries of excusable rage and common decency, at least in Reed’s opinion. Of course, it had been Major Hayes, not Archer, who had led the way across that sometimes fine, difficult-to-distinguish line, and this came as no surprise to Reed; as far as the lieutenant was concerned, the arrogant MACO commanding officer lacked even the most rudimentary shred of human compassion, and therefore simply didn’t know any better.
However, Archer’s decision to follow Hayes’s lead in beating Xindi-related intelligence out of Trahve had been truly shocking—as well as ineffectual, since the information Trahve revealed had turned out to be nothing more than bait for a trap that had very nearly killed the entire team.
To Reed, the worst aspect of the entire affair had been the captain’s decision to sanction a so-called “coercive interrogation.” This had led to a display of savagery that Reed hadn’t believed to be within his commanding officer’s capabilities. And while Reed could certainly understand the captain’s willingness to accept the sacrifice of his own personal ethical standards for the safety of the people of Earth—one might even characterize such an act as indicative of an unselfish disregard for