The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [182]
But now, he stood alone on a desolated and deserted Enterprise-E, with nothing to do but think.
Well, there was one thing he could do. Should do.
The open file sat before him, two words blazed in yellow. Dear Will. The cursor blinked at him, patiently awaiting further input, as it had been for fifteen minutes now, while Jean-Luc sat in his quarters, contemplatively sipping from a cup of hot tea.
It was a Starfleet tradition for captains whose executive officers had just been given captaincies of their own to send them a letter, offering congratulations and maybe a nugget or two of wisdom, and Jean-Luc had no intention of breaking that tradition now. He wanted to send the letter soon, so that it would be waiting for Will when he set foot on the Titan. But what could he say to him? What sort of “wisdom” could he impart that he hadn’t already over the many years they had served together?
The sad truth was that no one had ever written Jean-Luc such a letter. The circumstances under which he had become captain of the Stargazer had been both abrupt and unconventional, to say the least. No one had imparted to him any sort of great knowledge at the time that he could now pass on to Will. He didn’t really know what kind of content normally went into these things, having never read one himself. He had just sort of heard of them, was familiar with the concept.
He was not feeling particularly wise at the moment, anyway.
But he needed to do this. If he didn’t, he would be letting Will down. He felt that he had left enough people down recently. But what could he write? Tentatively, he began typing out the next few words: I am writing to offer my congratulations on your achieving command of one of Starfleet’s best and newest vessels.
No. That sounded stiff and formal—this was not a letter to a man he had known for fifteen years. He needed something deeper, something personal. Something like…
With a start, Jean-Luc stood up from his desk and hurried over to one of the storage cabinets. He opened up the bottom drawer, revealing a number of personal items he had acquired over the years, many of them objects that had survived the crash of the EnterpriseD, including the Picard family’s photo album and—beneath it, at the bottom of the drawer—a very battered and old padd.
Of course, he hadn’t needed to save the padd. The file on it could have been transferred to any other computer, but it was one of those things he had never gotten around to doing. So he had held on to the device all these years, and eventually it had reached the point where he didn’t want to transfer its contents to somewhere else—an entire padd being devoted to just one file made that file special, in its own way.
Jean-Luc returned to his desk chair and tapped the padd on, reading what was displayed on its screen.
Dear Jean-Luc Picard,
I am fully aware that in an organization as large as Starfleet it is impossible for all the officers of a rank to know each other, much less all those that are above and below them. Nevertheless, I feel that there is a certain bond between us, and it is that bond that made me sit down tonight and write this letter to you, a man I know only as a name on a personnel file.
It was a letter from Thomas Halloway, the man who had commanded the EnterpriseD for that brief span of time before Jean-Luc had taken over—not to mention, the man who had built her.
Jean-Luc had found the letter waiting for him when he had come aboard the EnterpriseD just before its first mission, the trip out to Farpoint Station on Deneb IV. In the assorted business of assuming command, and then the excitement brought on by Q and the duplicitous Bandi, Jean-Luc hadn’t had time to read the letter right off the bat. He’d finally gotten around to doing so once the Enterprise had taken her