The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [185]
Attached to the report on Wolf 359 was a note from one of the workers at Utopia Planitia on that day, a young civilian technician named Isaakerr:
I was working on the bridge that day, connecting the main viewscreen up to the ship’s systems. Captain Halloway was in the first officer’s chair—he always refused to use the captain’s chair, saying it was reserved for the man who would really be captain—going over some status reports. Then the call came in.
Halloway went into the ready room, a somber look on his face. When he came back out five minutes later, it looked as though he might’ve been crying—but I was the only one who could see it. When he turned to face the rest of the bridge crew, it was with a look of grim determination and nothing else. He immediately gave the orders necessary to get the ship ready for launch, cutting corners I didn’t think it was possible to cut. The Melbourne had been armed, at least, and she could still be used as a weapon against the Borg.
He gave all the Starfleet personnel the option to stay on board or remain in the dockyard—most stayed, of course—but he ordered all the civilians off the ship immediately. I told him I wanted to finish connecting the viewscreen first. If he was going into battle, he’d need to be able to see what he was doing. He smiled and nodded, telling me to get a move on. He had a battle to fight.
I finished in what was probably record time, and as I was stepping into the turbolift, he came up from behind and grabbed my arm. “I want you to do one thing for me,” he said. “If I don’t come home today, find my wife and children and say good-bye to them for me. I’m doing this to keep them safe, and I won’t let anyone hurt them. Tell them I love them.”
I nodded my assent, and he released my arm. I stumbled into the turbolift, and as the doors shut behind me, tears began to well up in my eyes. I’d always considered Captain Halloway pretty likable and a good boss, but on that day he had been extraordinary. There had been an authority in his voice I had never heard before: he had a job to do, and by God he was going to do it, even if it wasn’t the job he had expected.
He did his job that day. And in tribute to him, so did I.
No coward, then. Jean-Luc found it hard to believe he’d ever felt as poorly of the man as he had. By his own admission, Halloway had been ill suited to command, yet when the time had come to do it, he had done it, and done it well by all accounts.
Jean-Luc was not surprised he hadn’t noticed the other captain’s name on the casualty lists from Wolf 359. There had been so many dead at that battle—eleven thousand—that he had never been able to truly read them all. Once again, he had come so close to meeting Thomas Halloway, and yet he had failed.
But they had certainly left their marks on each other’s lives.
Picard’s eyes were once again drawn to the letter on the padd he held in his lap—the last wisdom of a dead man, evidently. Halloway had refused command of the Enterprise because he did not consider himself an explorer, did not want to spend what could quite feasibly be twenty years of his life exploring the vastness of space.
But he wouldn’t have. Despite her original charter to explore the unknown galactic mass beyond Deneb IV, the EnterpriseD had been forced to turn back only a couple of weeks into her journey, to answer a distress call from one of the science vessels assigned to tail the Enterprise and follow up her discoveries in-depth. The ensuing crisis was taken care of, but the backtracking had put the Enterprise in a position to be the closest ship to Ligon II when Starfleet found itself in need of a vital vaccine from that planet.
From then on, the Enterprise had somehow never managed to make it back out to the Denebian galactic mass, being sent from mission to mission within explored space or at least very near it. Starfleet Command had promised to get the ship’s mission back on track, but they had come to view the ship as too useful to send away for any length of time. Jean-Luc had protested,