Unauthorised weapons fire on the ship!

He might be officially off duty, but in effect, Malcolm Reed was as perpetually on call as the captain. The alarm shrilled out of his computer, and he leaped out of the bunk where he'd been lying sleepless, glanced at the screen, grabbed the phase pistol from the drawer of his desk and darted out into the corridor.

The blinking image of the alert had showed him that the weapon discharge had taken place in Ensign Sato's cabin. Fear and anger dispelling the miasma of the previous hours like a hurricane wind, he sped along the corridor and rather than waste time waiting for the turbo-lift – the Security response team would probably use that – swarmed up the access ladder and raced around the remaining curvature of the corridor on 'E' Deck. He arrived outside Sato's quarters panting for breath, but the first on the scene.

"Ensign!" he shouted, his fingers on the door control panel, ready to key in his emergency override.

There was no response, but he thought he heard crying.

Without hesitation, he slammed in the code. As the door hissed back, he darted inside, covering the room with the pistol – but there was no intruder in sight.

Ensign Sato was in bed. Her blankets were in utter disorder, and she was huddled back in one corner, wild-eyed. And clutched in one hand she had a phase pistol – fortunately not aimed at him, at least for the present.

"Ensign." His heart thudding, he tried to speak calmly. "Are you all right?"

Her eyes were brimming with tears. "I had a nightmare."

"A... a nightmare?" He bit his lip. If anyone was entitled to nightmares, it was Hoshi Sato, but being in possession of a weapon as dangerous as this... how the hell had she got hold of it?

She still looked as though she wasn't sure where she was. Awkwardly, to make himself appear less threatening to her, he squatted down. "You're quite safe now," he said gently. Questions could wait till later. "You're back on Enterprise. We won't let anyone hurt you again."

"I was scared," she wept. For a moment he hadn't been quite sure she was genuine, but real tears were coursing down her face now. "I was so scared!"

"Of course you were. I would have been scared." And that was no lie; when he'd finally come face to face with the hulking brutes that were Xindi reptilians, he'd understood far better why the captain had returned from imprisonment looking as though he'd gone twelve rounds in a boxing ring with a heavyweight champion. How it must have been for a slip of a lass like Hoshi, alone in their power…

"Please. Just hold me," she entreated, to his horrified dismay.

At that moment the clatter of boots in the corridor outside announced the arrival of the security detail. Anxious to preserve his junior officer's dignity, he activated the comm. and said that the situation was under control and he'd file a report on the incident in due course. Nobody needed to know that he was in a state of advanced undress either – fortunately not a complete one – though he hurriedly filched a towel that was lying over a chair and wrapped it around his lower half, contributing rather more to the propriety of dress that was appropriate for the occasion.

It was against regulations for him to be alone in a cabin with a partly-dressed junior officer. It was entirely improper. Generations of Reeds span in their graves as Malcolm moved forward and sat gingerly on the edge of the bunk, taking his opportunity to gently detach the illicit pistol from its occupant's fingers and lay it aside on the floor beside his own.

He was far too uncomfortable and embarrassed to make the first move, apart from awkwardly taking her hand. Fortunately for him, Hoshi helped herself, hitching over to wrap her arms around him. Hot tears ran down his collarbone as she buried her face in the angle of his neck.

However proper, it would have been utterly inhumane to have sat unresponsive in the face of such obvious need. Slowly his arms closed around her, and he patted her gently between the shoulder blades. "You're safe now," he said again, inadequately.

"I ought to have done more," she wept. "I tried. I really tried. But I couldn't stop them. I should have been able to."

Her guilt struck like an axe blade into his own, and suddenly he too was on the verge of tears. "I know you did your best," he said, his voice rather choked. "But sometimes however hard you try, it's … it's just not meant to be."

"I tried to kill myself. I haven't told anybody that. But they caught me. The bastards. They made me tell them."

The thought of her in such fear and despair that she would attempt suicide made him tighten his arms around her, and for a moment they clung to each other, united in the experience of that depth of agony. "You tried your hardest," he muttered against her hair, feeling helpless. "You did your best. That's all anyone can ask of any of us. And if – if you hadn't been there, we'd never have known how to beat the Weapon's internal safeguards."

For a long moment he hesitated behind his walls; but why should she have to believe herself the only one of the crew who had something to reproach themselves with?

"I should have done better too," he mumbled. "I've ... I've wondered ever since, if ... if the captain wasn't prepared enough... if I should have insisted he did more training..."

She gave a watery chuckle. "'Insisted'?"

"I could have done."

"You could have tried." She raised her head to show him drowned eyes that he suddenly realised with a shock were profoundly beautiful. "You think it would have helped Enterprise to have Hayes promoted over your head because the captain wanted a yes-man who wouldn't rock the boat?"

"He was more than that."

"He was. But I'm asking you to answer me honestly, Malcolm. If I looked through your assessments of the self-defence capabilities of this crew, would I find one entry against Captain Archer that said 'Needs more training'?"

"Maybe it might have saved him if there had been," he said bitterly.

"And maybe he slipped on a patch of oil and fell, and nothing any of us could have done would have saved him. Malcolm, we'll never know." She patted his face gently, consolingly. The small, soft friendliness reached into the freezing wasteland inside him, a thawing wind from the South.

"We both did our best. In the end, we helped the captain do what had to be done. That's all he wanted. That's all we were there for. That was our duty. Anything else ... well, he wouldn't have said there was anything else. Apart from protecting the ship, of course. And we all know whose job that is."

'Firstly, you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own respecting their propriety…'

…If Nelson had been able to look centuries into the future, he couldn't have found more fitting words for it.

"Yes," said Malcolm, feeling the first faint beginnings of a weary peace steal into his soul. "And I suppose it still is."

It didn't mean that he was guiltless, both for sins of omission and commission. But posterity would have to have the last say on that; and at least posterity would still be alive to do so.

The captain would have been proud.