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“Same goes for me,” said the civilian male, who had called himself Yutaka Shima. He turned a hard glare in Archer’s direction. “In the meantime, we’ll try not to dribble blood onto your fine table linens here.”

T’Pol refrained from replying, and observed that Archer was doing likewise as Chef reentered the room bearing a large metal platter heaped with bread, vegetables, meat, and pitchers filled with cold water and Terran fruit juices. The contrast between the immaculate white table settings with the ragtag condition of two of the diners suddenly became both stark and absurd in T’Pol’s eyes. But whatever fault she might have found in their manner, the obvious toughness of these humans and their tenacity in the face of almost certain death struck T’Pol as anything but absurd.

Chef exited once again and Archer made an expansive gesture toward the food. “Go ahead and eat, please. We can debrief you about the Romulan attack later, if you prefer.”

Yutaka Shima merely eyed the rice, steamed vegetables, and Terran animal flesh on his plate for a long moment, as though he were grappling internally with temptation. “I thought the last thing I’d ever eat would come out of one of those damned emergency ration packs,” he said at length.

“Shima, those were all my people had to eat after the Romulans knocked out the power systems,” Colonel Lundy said, scowling at the contents of her own plate. “And e-rats are all we MACOs are going to eat for the duration of the crisis. At least the ten percent or so of us who are still able to eat anything.”

Although Archer neither flinched nor winced at the colonel’s almost accusatory tone, T’Pol thought he seemed to deflate ever so slightly.

“Colonel, I’m sorry,” the captain said very quietly.

Lundy pushed her plate brusquely toward the table’s center, forcing T’Pol to lunge forward to prevent Chef’s floral centerpiece from toppling over and dumping water everywhere.

“Frankly, Captain, I’m not interested in hearing how sorry you are,” the colonel said, folding her arms before her. “Just see to it this food gets to some of those civilians out in the corridor.”

Archer frowned. “Care to decide which ones?”

Lundy scowled. “Excuse me?”

“Were there any particular individuals in the multitude we just rescued that you had in mind?” Archer said, speaking softly but matching the colonel’s scowl with a hard glare of his own. “Or are you just making a grand gesture? Look, Colonel, I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am about what happened to the outpost, but—”

“And again, Captain, I don’t want to hear it,” Lundy said, interrupting.

T’Pol was about to interject something about common courtesy when Shima spoke up. “Manetta, I wouldn’t mind hearing just how sorry the captain is.”

Archer sat in silence, facing the unblinking stares of the two bedraggled outpost leaders, though it must have felt like a fusillade from Enterprise’s forward phase cannons.

Silence descended upon the room until the captain broke it. “What exactly are you trying to say, Mister Shima?”

“I think you understand perfectly well what we’re saying, Captain,” Shima said, pushing himself back from the table. “We called Starfleet for help as soon as we knew we were under attack. But you took your goddamned sweet time getting here, didn’t you?”

Archer’s stony manner might have impressed a Vulcan master. “Starfleet’s resources are spread rather thinly, Mister Shima. Particularly now. I’m sure Colonel Lundy is well aware of the logistical realities of interstellar defense.” He nodded in Lundy’s direction.

“Oh, and I’m sure she’d be good enough to explain them to me,” said Shima. “And that will make everything right, won’t it? Please do us all a favor, Captain, and spare us the patronizing lectures.”

Lundy seemed both cooler and more disciplined than her civilian counterpart, if no less angry. Her eyes locked upon Archer, she said, “I might be just a lowly frontier ground-pounder to Starfleet, but I’m well aware of this: Enterprise is one of the two fastest Earth