JP by Scott and Elli-Navine
Following the events of TBR#020
1462 words

As the conference ended, Elli leaned her elbows on the table and put her face in her hands with a kind of ecstatic relief. She’d gone from the joyous surprise of her promotion the day before, to believing she’d put her career and everything she loved on the line to save lives. Even though Pax would have taken the heat primarily, she knew it would have fallen over her as well. She just let the immense stress and relief finish its roiling waves as the sound of feet filing out of the room made her think she was the last one in the room. But when she finally looked up again, Scott was still there in his seat across the conference table.

He was similarly locked in his own mind. He was angry. Not because they had ignored his objection; he understood there could be disagreement. He was angry because they had succeeded. There would be no lasting consequences for breaking General Order One. No response to them changing the timeline of an entire planet and its population. His colleagues were actually relieved – not quite at the point of giving each other high-fives, but happy all the same. And he was the one sat there knowing that he was damned right, yet he was the only one that wasn’t happy about it.

As they sat there in silence, he reached up and plucked the commbadge from his chest. He turned it over in his fingers, staring at the chevron-shaped insignia of Starfleet. It was more than just a communications device. It was a symbol: a reminder of who they were and what they represented. Starfleet existed for the purpose of protecting the Federation. Not just its planets and its people, but the very foundations it was built upon. Seeing that emblem on the uniform of every officer he served with was a reminder of what they stood for. United, and side-by-side. Today, he’d felt like he was no longer shoulder-to-shoulder with his own crewmates; his own friends.

Elli’s eyes traced the badge as he turned it. “Scott—” she wasn’t sure what to say next, and just reached for the obvious. “You’re upset.”

Scott’s eyes flicked up at her for a moment. They locked there, holding her gaze for a few seconds, before putting the commbadge down face-up on the conference table.

“Am I?” he asked, not really sure what else to say himself. What was there to say? The DTI people had made it pretty clear that nobody was going to get in trouble. The mood around the table had been just as clear. Aside from maybe Pride, they were probably ready to go for celebratory drinks and a pat on the back. He stared at the symbol on the table. “My old history teacher used to ask us a question in class: if the people in power don’t enforce the law when it’s broken, is it actually the law? Guess he wasn’t thinking about time travel or anything, but…” he finished the sentence with an apathetic sigh.

Elli worked her jaw slightly. She had tried to match his gaze but couldn’t help but break it. It was too hard a stare. She would never tell him, but she had still intended to go, even if the answer from Pax had been no. She had even prepared an algorithm to lock out computer controls and known that it would have been Scott, one of her closest friends, not to mention a talented code breaker in his own right, trying to shut down her transport. “If the people in power don’t exercise good judgement in applying the law, aren’t they just heartless tyrants? Can you condemn billions of innocent people to die just because there’s a law that says it can’t be helped? What good is law without some discernment?” She found unbidden the words of her pacifist father coming out of her mouth. “What is Law without Mercy?”

“You think the Prime Directive lacks mercy?” he retorted, his voice raised. “It’s called General Order One. It doesn’t have shades of grey or degrees of interpretation. It’s an absolute.” His fist came down on the table hard. “We both took the same oath. To uphold the Prime Directive even if it led to our own deaths.”

Elli shrank at his reaction. “This wasn’t purely a matter of the prime directive, Scott. I’m not saying it isn’t a good rule on the whole. But there’s exceptions.”

“I’m not here to debate the law. Apparently we didn’t do anything wrong anyway.” He turned his chair away from the table; away from her expression of hurt. “Two years ago, when I worked for Starfleet Intelligence, we were supposed to be helping the Romulans pick up after the whole Hobus incident. I was on board a covert transport ship running civilians out of the Rhei’line system. It was an old listening post of theirs; full of juicy little secrets. They’d managed to stay hidden from the Tal Shiar for months, but someone at Starfleet Intelligence HQ had decided that given their knowledge of all the old Romulan Empire secrets we should extract them.”

“Naturally the orders were to prioritise the high-ranking ones first, and given we were only running a small cruiser we had to do it over a few runs. Finally, after weeks of travelling, we were returning to collect their families.” His face hardened as he recalled the memory. “When we returned to the system, the entire colony had been wiped out by the Tal Shiar. See, they’d been shadowing our convoy for weeks, waiting until we’d left before they swept in and…” He didn’t really need to finish his grim explanation. “Women. Children. Indiscriminately destroyed. All because we decided that we had to go in and help. If we’d not been there, the Tal Shiar would never have found them.” He looked back over at Elli. “All because of our good intentions. Our mercy.”

Holding back tears, she couldn’t respond right away. It was tragic, and it had little to do with the prime directive, but more to do with the idea of intervention in general. But they were presently returning to a heading to get to the source of another Tal Shiar plot. She braved a hand over top of his and said with quiet sureness, “It wasn’t Mercy that killed them. It was the Tal Shiar. Let’s get the Tal Shiar.”

“‘Let’s get the Tal Shiar’…” he repeated, with a little snort. Was she really so naive? “A couple of months later Mars happened. Starfleet withdrew their aid from the Romulans. So what good would it have done anyway? We gave up on them when it no longer suited us, and now half of their old space is wilderness, the other is run by those criminals.” He shook his head. “The old rules just don’t seem to work anymore. Sometimes I look at this…” he indicated the commbadge. “I look at it and wonder if it still means what it used to.”

She picked up his badge reflectively, considering her own many crises of faith in the past several months. “If there’s anything I’ve learned since serving on the Potemkin, it’s always complicated. We’re always at a disadvantage. There’s limits on our resources, our time, our knowledge, our ethical boundaries. We can only serve our part. We can’t help that the circumstances are stacked up the way they are.” She put the badge back in his hand and closed his fingers around it. “We can just stand.”

“Stand,” he acknowledged. “But stand for what?”

It led right back to their officers oath and the reason for his troubled heart in the first place. “To bear the true faith of the principles of the UFP in protecting her people and her allies, to the best of our ability.” It was boiled down, but wasn’t trite. “And the times we fail trying? We’re Starfleet. We never give up.” It was difficult to see Scott losing heart, but Elli understood that feeling. She let go of his hand.

“Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm,” he replied. “Winston Churchill. I enjoyed those history classes.”

Unsure if the quote was a dig at her or an agreement, Elli decided to assume the later. She cleared her throat and grinned sheepishly. “So uh, I’m supposed to update my phaser certs, now that I’m cleared to carry a type-2. Maybe some time on a firing range is in order. Want to join me? I wouldn’t mind some pointers.”

Casting a look down at the badge in his hand, he let out a breath. “All right. I guess we’re still allowed to shoot things at least.”