The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [162]
A future that just might make your family’s sacrifices worthwhile, he thought. He knew he couldn’t utter the thought aloud- at least, not yet.
Bert merely fixed him with another hard stare that seemed to last for hours.
Finally, Bert’s expression softened. “I’m sorry, Mike. I know you’re just trying to help. I guess I’m just not in the mood to celebrate. At least… not yet.”
Miguel nodded, and gave Bert a gentle hug. He knew that the grieving process always took time, just as it had for Bert after Elizabeth Tucker died in the Xindi attack. And he understood that some wounds could tear the scabs right off all the older ones.
But he also knew that there were only two directions in which one could look: forward and backward. As he tried to focus his attention forward, onto the distant stage from which the future was to be summoned today, he noted that Bert had turned in his seat, to resume staring in the direction of the three Starfleet officers.
Backward, at least for now.
Miguel sighed. It was likely to be a very long afternoon.
The box in which Malcolm Reed found himself seated was so high that he half expected to succumb to explosive decompression at any moment. Or at least a real gully-washer of a nosebleed.
With Hoshi Sato and Travis Mayweather seated to his right, he looked below and saw a carpet of seats and boxes, occupied by both ordinary civilians and official delegates from worlds across the sector and beyond, spreading downward and away into apparent infinity.
And just beyond lay the stage, which supported the raised, brightly spotlighted dais where galactic history was to be made beneath an impossibly distant backdrop of blue-globe-and-laurel-leaf Earth flags, complemented by the multicolored banners and symbols of three other worlds. Unlike the stadium’s multitude of seats, boxes, and viewing stands, the dais remained empty as yet. The air seemed charged with anticipation.
But not quite enough to ameliorate Reed’s annoyance at the all but cosmic distance that separated him and his colleagues from the dais from which their captain was to give his address.
“Are you certain these are the right seats?” Reed asked no one in particular.
“Yep,” Mayweather said, speaking just loudly enough to be heard above the murmurs of the not-quite-settled crowd.
Reed harrumphed under his breath. “They don’t seem very ‘VIP’ to me.”
“I’m sure the admiral wanted us to have a view that took in the scope of the occasion,” Hoshi said with what might have been the merest ghost of a smirk.
Reed wasn’t quite certain whether or not she was being ironic, although he had assumed that Admiral Gardner had put them up here as a passive-aggressive way of punishing both Captain Archer and his command staff for having attempted to intervene in the Coridan Prime disaster rather than proceeding immediately home to Earth, per Gardner’s initial orders.
“From this distance you can’t tell an Andorian from a Tellarite,” he grumped.
After Phlox conducted Trip’s grieving parents toward one of the VIP boxes, Archer returned to his ancient, crumbling dressing room to finish making the final preparations for his speech, for better or worse.
When he opened the door, he found a black-robed male Vulcan waiting for him.
“Can I help you?” he asked, wondering how his visitor had gotten past the security personnel who had been hovering nearly invisibly nearby ever since Archer and his crew had arrived at Candlestick.
Archer’s jaw dropped like an anchor when the Vulcan responded with an incongruous ear-to-ear grin- and spoke with a voice that he had half expected never to hear again.
“Cap’n, it’s me. It’s Trip.”
Archer’s bemusement quickly gave way to a broad smile of his own. He walked over to his old friend and grabbed him in an unself-conscious bear hug.
“Easy, Captain. In spite of how I look these days, my ribs are