The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [158]
Just as there had been nothing to bury after Trip’s sister Lizzie had been at the wrong place at the wrong time when those damned Xindi had come calling, dealing death from a calm blue springtime sky….
Charles vainly forced himself to consider that much younger version of himself who so loved to laugh. But instead, all he could really focus on was how much that man had lost during the past couple of years. Thank goodness we still have Albert, he told himself, though the thought did little to assuage his grief. Albert had declined Archer’s invitation to meet with him today, explaining that he preferred to stay away from the day’s ceremonies. He’d said he preferred to grieve in his own way, with his husband, Miguel, and their own small nucleus of friends and loved ones. Charles looked forward to seeing their only surviving child again soon, but wished with all his heart that the circumstances could have been different.
He entered the narrow but brightly illuminated conference room alongside Elaine, who gripped her small handbag so hard that her knuckles whitened until they made a perfect contrast with her somber black dress. They both continued standing as they faced the man who had guided them through the auditorium’s vast backstage labyrinth, the sympathetic-looking male Denobulan who had identified himself as Phlox, the chief medical officer on Enterprise- and as one of Trip’s closest friends. The Denobulan’s startlingly blue eyes gleamed with unshed tears, making him appear so distraught that Charles’s heart went out to him.
“I’m sure you did everything you could to save him, Doctor,” Elaine said, just as Charles was about to say something very similar. He hoped that the doctor would at least take whatever comfort he could from their absolution.
“Thank you, Mrs. Tucker,” said Phlox, though he suddenly looked even more distraught than he had before. “But when you’ve treated, saved, and lost as many patients as I have…” He interrupted himself briefly, as though trying to gather his thoughts, or perhaps reining himself in for fear of saying too much. After taking a deep breath that he let out almost as a sigh, he resumed: “Well, let’s just say that no physician can ever be completely above second-guessing himself- particularly if the patient is someone to whom the doctor feels close.”
The room’s single door opened again, admitting a man and a woman, both of them displaying somber expressions. The latter was a tall, attractive Vulcan dressed unexpectedly in a Starfleet uniform; a neatly aligned trio of rectangular rank bars on her collar identified her as a commander. The Vulcan woman clutched a small suitcase at her side.
Commander T’Pol, Charles thought, recalling her image from numerous news vids, as well as the many times Trip had mentioned her during his correspondences home. Although there were many things, of course, that his son had left unsaid, Charles always had the impression that Trip had been rather sweet on T’Pol, or perhaps vice versa. When the news services reported that the terrorist John Frederick Paxton had created a human-Vulcan hybrid infant using DNA from both Trip and T’Pol, Charles had found his dashed dreams of grandfatherhood suddenly rekindled, which surprised him after the terrible blow Lizzie’s death had dealt the whole family. Of course, fate had quashed those hopes with finality when it decided to take Trip from them as well as Lizzie.
Charles immediately recognized the grim-faced, somewhat taller human standing beside T’Pol as Jonny Archer, to whom Trip had first introduced both him and Elaine some twenty years earlier, though neither Charles nor Elaine had seen him very much at all during most of the last decade or so. Though he was smartly turned out in a formal blue-and-white Starfleet dress uniform, the captain seemed to have aged quite a bit since he’d last seen his face on the compic, about two weeks ago. Charles supposed that between the Xindi crisis he had already endured, the recent Coridan tragedy, and the large role the media had credited him with in