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The call lit up the screen of his mini-Padd and sent the pinging loud as a bell through his room, and Alonzo Freeman groaned and groped for the device in the dark. “Carol?” he said groggily, not bothering to look at the I.D.; nobody else ever called at this time of the night.
But the voice that responded wasn’t his wife’s. “Alonzo?”
Janeway’s voice was quavering, and that more than anything was what woke him up properly. The admiral sat up, swinging his legs over the side of his bed, brows furrowing in concern. “Kathy? Are you alright, what happened?” A horrible thought struck him: “Did something happen to Chakot–?”
“No. No, Chakotay’s fine, it’s– Alonzo, you need to go turn on the news. Now.”
With a growing sense of dread, the man headed into the living room and fumbled with the viewscreen. “Kathy, just tell me what’s going o–”
He found the screen's on-button halfway through the sentence and felt the words die in his mouth. The FNN reporter’s words filtered into his brain like a background hum as the images washed over him: “–Today at 1:22 A.M., the Romulan star went supernova several weeks earlier than expected. Fortunately, it appears that the damage to the galaxy at large was minimal due to the Federation’s intervention, but the Romulan homeworld–”
But the Romulan homeworld. Freeman watched as the footage from a data-stream, apparently transmitted off-world just moments before the sun’s explosion, repeated on-loop over the reporter’s narration. There was no sound, but he could see the Romulan civilians panicking and running futilely for cover as the sky flared with light. “No,” he whispered, voice strangled.
Janeway’s trembling voice returned: “It was too early. This wasn’t– it should have been weeks from now…”
Freeman stared at the screen, feeling as if he were merely registering data from his body instead of inhabiting it. His eyes were stinging, badly. “Kathy–”
“I’ve sent my closest ships out, to help any survivors they can find,” he heard her say hoarsely. He nodded. Right. He was an admiral, he had orders to give.
“I’ll– I’ll put out the order.” Even as he said it, he knew it wouldn’t matter. Every one of his ships, including the Cerritos, was days out from the Romulan system even at top speed.
One month from now, according to their painstakingly-planned mission rosters, they would have been mere minutes away.
“Alonzo,” his colleague said, awful hesitation in her voice as if somehow there was still worse news, and suddenly he knew.
“...Ambassador Spock?”
“He must have deployed the red matter, but—Alonzo, he’s– he’s gone.”
He closed his eyes and mouthed a silent no. He thought he could hear Janeway swallow, and knew she was thinking the same thing he was. It felt like the last adult had left the room; the old guard was gone, leaving only fading memories and history books behind them.
They were well and truly on their own, now.
“Bar,” her voice crackled weakly across the line, and he opened his eyes. “Half an hour.”
Freeman nodded, swallowed. Janeway lived closer to the hole-in-the-wall they’d been frequenting for their planning sessions than he did. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Save me a seat.” He was going to have to call and wake up Carol. Oh, god. Sooner or later, sometime tomorrow, he was going to have to face Beckett. He didn’t know how much her mother had told her; depending on what exactly she knew, she might blame him for not doing enough. Freeman looked back at the screen. The footage from the blast was replaying, over and over, and he swallowed the growing lump of guilt in his throat. Right at this moment, he would have agreed with her.
It was so late that even the seedy bar, far from the livelier streets of San Francisco, was almost dead. If the bartender cared about the two middle-aged coworkers, drowning their sorrows in awkwardly-fitting civilian clothing at half past two in the morning, he didn’t say a word. They came here often enough; maybe he thought they were having an affair. Freeman didn’t know and didn’t care.
They were both several deep when he finally spoke up. “We should have done more,” he said hollowly.
“There wasn’t anything else we could have done,” Janeway sighed. “Even if our ships had gotten there in time, we wouldn’t have been able to evacuate more than a couple thousand people.”
“We should have sent them sooner, we should have–”
“Alonzo, we were a failsafe. We both thought Ambassador Spock’s plan would…” She trailed off, her throat closing up as her eyes suddenly grew glassy with tears. The man shook his head and looked down into his glass. Silence fell over them, as cold and heavy as grief.
“...You know, when I made admiral,” he mused at last, mostly to himself, “I thought it meant I’d finally be able to make a real difference in this job.” He gave a dead, dark chuckle and picked up his glass for a drink. “Thought it meant I’d be the one making decisions, instead of having them made for me.” He tipped it back.
“The record will show that we were part of the dissenting opinion,” Janeway muttered, sounding as if she were trying to convince herself. He set the glass down, hard.
“I want to tell people.”
“You know we can’t do that.”
“Kathy–”
“If it ever gets out that we planned to send our ships to help evacuate, against the council’s decision, we’ll both be court martialed,” she said sharply, turning to face him.
“We’ve always known that. I was prepared for that to happen, so was Carol!”
“And so was I, when there were lives we could save. But that’s not the situation anymore. We’ve got too many other decisions and projects riding on our influence, Alonzo, and we can’t help anyone if we’re working in a penal colony somewhere.”
“And what’s our excuse supposed to be?” he demanded. “That we were ‘just following orders?’”
“If you’ve got a better plan, I’d love to hear it.”
“I do have a better plan! Tell people the truth! I don’t know about you, but I’d rather spend ten years in a penal colony for disobeying the Council than go the rest of my life with people thinking I let a genocide happen when I could have done something to stop it!”
“So then what’s your plan, pull another Picard?” she finally snapped back, gesturing angrily with her hand; the alcohol in the glass splashed and threatened to spill out. “His resignation might have been noble, but it sure as hell wasn’t practical!”
“I know that, but by god, Kathy, how long are we going to keep doing this! First they dismantled the androids, and then the way they've been treating ex-Borg-"
“Don’t you go there,” Janeway hissed.
“They just let a planet die! We let them die!” Freeman heard the guilt cracking in his own voice. “How much longer are we just going to be the ‘dissenting opinion’ on a Council that’s undermining everything the Federation stands for; at least Picard did something!”
“What he did was make his opinion on all other matters obsolete! We can do more for Starfleet and the Federation from within the system than outside of it!” He looked away angrily, unable to refute this logic but unable to swallow it either. “Alonzo,” she insisted, setting her glass down on the counter and trying to get him to meet her gaze, to no avail. “Listen to what I’m saying, we have people depending on us. And you know that if we leave, they won’t be putting reasonable people at the helm to replace us. We can’t just abandon everyone we’re protecting to make a point.”
The other admiral’s eyes flicked back to hers, and she could see was angry— damned angry. She couldn’t tell whether it was at her, the situation, or himself. “I am listening to what you’re saying, Kathy,” he said lowly. “You’re saying we’re the good ones."
Her lips parted to respond, but the loaded phrase had fallen like a leaden weight between them. Freeman stood up, drained his glass and set it down.
“Well, guess what. I don’t feel like the good ones.”
Janeway watched him turn and walk out of the bar, and then sighed. She looked above the bar where various pieces of ostensibly nautical-themed decor were hung over the shelves of alcohol, among them several ship’s wheels from the helms of antique boats, an old fisherman's cap and a water-warped fiddle.
The admiral pursed her lips, eyeing the instrument for a long moment. Then she lifted her glass, and downed the bitter dregs in one go.