Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [112]
Staring into his water glass, he experienced a fleeting memory of forcible immersion that made him shudder involuntarily; he wondered yet again whether the scars caused by such traumas would ever go away entirely.
Reed knew he could not consider his own hands to be entirely clean either. We were all a party to torture on that mission, one way or another, Reed thought, his face reddening in shame. Myself included, for not doing enough to keep it from happening in the first place.
It all led him to ask himself two inescapable, and fundamentally unanswerable, questions: What would he do the next time he witnessed such behavior on the part of either Major Hayes or Captain Archer? Would he go so far as to raise a weapon to prevent an act of torture?
He could only hope he never had to find the answers.
“Malcolm?” Belatedly, Reed realized that the captain had been speaking to him.
“Sir?” Reed said, ignoring Mayweather’s wry grin at his absentmindedness. He struggled to concentrate instead on the captain’s wearily inquisitive gaze.
“I was asking if you knew Ensign Chandra well,” Archer said as he tossed another gobbet of steak to Porthos, who snatched it expertly out of the air.
Reed looked back down into his disarrayed but still largely uneaten shepherd’s pie, and decided that he really wasn’t very hungry. “We were really only acquaintances, Captain. We played racquetball once or twice. But I honestly can’t say I knew him very well.”
That admission made Reed’s face blaze with chagrin yet again. One of his tactical-studies instructors from back in his wet navy days had once told him that “career” was merely another way to spell “isolation.” Sure enough, those words had proved to be true enough for Reed, who now spent the lion’s share of his time honing Enterprise’s tactical capabilities rather than forging anything more than the most superficial of friendships. Reed rarely paused even to consider such things these days, especially since the Xindi crisis had begun. Today, however, he found that he profoundly regretted this particular aspect of his life.
“I knew him a little bit,” Mayweather said. “We shared some meals after alpha watch now and then. He had a pretty interesting family background. Northern India. Made me want to go to Earth to see it someday.”
Archer pushed his plate forward, glanced down at it, then handed the remainder of his steak, bone and all, down to Porthos. The beagle wasted no time getting on the outside of it. Then the captain sat back in his chair and cast an unfocused stare at the bulkhead behind and above Reed’s head.
“I barely knew him at all,” he said in a hushed tone better suited for a priest’s confessional than for the captain’s personal mess. “I should have known him better. I should know all of them. Then, at least when I’m writing that last letter to their families—” He stopped himself, clearly about to be overcome with emotion, and just as clearly unwilling to allow that to happen, even in front of two of his most trusted officers.
Reed recognized and understood Archer’s pain instantly: whatever very occasional complaints Reed might have had about his duties interfering with his social life, the captain’s personal situation had to be at least an order of magnitude busier and more stressful than Reed’s was. He must be the loneliest man in the universe.
Archer raised his glass and took a large quaff of the light-colored beer he’d been using to wash down his dinner. Setting the half-emptied glass down in front of his plate, he turned his eyes first on Reed, then on Mayweather, and suddenly presented a decidedly businesslike demeanor.
“I’ve been a bit busy these last few hours with the memorial service and composing that letter to Ensign Chandra’s family,” Archer said. “So I haven’t had time yet to conduct a thorough after-action mission debriefing with either of