"Captain. Please come in."

"Counsellor. I apologise for the lateness of the hour."

"It's no trouble at all. I'm here whenever you need to talk."

Her room was like herself – cool and elegant. The flower still sat in the vase on the table, and as he seated himself Jean-Luc found himself almost incredulous that it should still be there, breathing its faint perfume out on the air.

She brought him wine. Normally he was quite an abstemious man, but normally she would have asked first. She set the glass down in front of him and sat down, watching him seriously.

He picked up the drink, but didn't immediately taste it. Instead he sat cradling the bowl between his palms, studying the light in the deep crimson heart of it.

"And so the mystery goes on," she said musingly, at last.

He gave a huff of a laugh, with very little humour in it. "The 'phenomenon' accelerated towards the planet during our visit. Then, almost to the minute of our departure, it slowed. Now, it's drifting ... exactly as it did before.

"I've given orders to maintain course and speed to match it when it arrives – keeping a safe distance, of course. The science team will watch it, study it. They already have probes ready to monitor any developments when it actually reaches the planet. But quite frankly, I've little expectation of them finding out anything about it."

He was silent again for a long time.

"How can two human beings live for over two hundred years?" he asked finally. "Was it something to do with being exposed to that phenomenon for a part of every year? I can't help but speculate that the two things must be connected. But proving that connection is a completely different thing."

Had she been less wise, she might have been startled by his suddenly setting down the glass and walking to the viewing port. Far below, Hir'vaQ II turned serenely, green and blue, streaked with cloud that was iridescent with the coming dawn.

Whatever it was, the mysterious 'phenomenon' would arrive later in the day if it maintained its current course and speed. Then to any distant watching eye, the planet would vanish, just as mysterious as the shroud that wrapped it; its image might gleam elsewhere, but it would be hidden.

Why had that sudden acceleration taken place? Was it a coincidence? As much a coincidence as the fact that it had ended as soon as they themselves had left the planet?

"Captain." Deanna spoke quietly behind him. "You came out here to explore the galaxy – to discover the wonderful things it contains.

"That will not necessarily always mean you succeed in understanding everything you discover."

"What is it?" He gazed towards where he thought it was. Now it was so much closer, there was a large patch where the stars appeared hazy. Perhaps what he was seeing was refractions of the real thing. "Am I being over-imaginative in seeing evidence of some kind of sentience in its behaviour?

"Did it respond to a changed situation on the planet? Did it somehow sense we were there? Did it – did it somehow know when the 'danger' was past, and there was no need for its intervention?"

"Unless we succeed in establishing some form of communication with it, none of those questions can ever be answered," she answered.

"This may be a limited opportunity to learn about this – this 'creature', if I may term it that. Data tells me that it appears to be on a collision course with the sun. We know that it seems able to initiate voluntary movement, but what if it does not recognise its own danger until too late?"

"Then nature will take its course, as it does in every galaxy in the universe where Captain Jean-Luc Picard is not present to intervene." Her voice held a rueful smile.

He sighed. She knew him so well.

"I've ordered the comms team to try to establish contact. We've broadcast towards it in every frequency imaginable – even radio waves! It may hear us, and have no means of communicating back – it may have no means of hearing us at all. Its 'sentience', if it is sentient, may be too rudimentary to encompass communication as we understand it, or so complex that our methods are on a par with a pair of hands beating on a hollow log.

"And down on the planet, those two human beings – possibly three – were able to communicate telepathically with animals with whom they had no evolutionary connection. How could that have happened? Could that have been some, some outcome, some gift, of the phenomenon? Along with that fantastically extended life span?"

"You're still very troubled about Lieutenant Reed," she said compassionately.

For a moment he said nothing. Then he came back and sat down, and picked up the wine again. "The law, and my duty as a Starfleet officer, gave me no choice. I had to take him back into custody.

"But I cannot help the reflection that in obeying my duty as a Starfleet officer I failed in my duty as a human being."

Deanna accorded that sorrowful and honest admission a respectful silence. "I've already discussed the outcome with the doctor," she said at last. "She believes that you allowed Mister Reed to finally die in peace. I'm not sure that counts as a failure."

"But I didn't go there with that intention. I went there to arrest him and tear him away from the only home he's known for only two centuries, and deliver him over to have his last days made wretched when it was plain he was too old and ailing to ever stand trial, even if he lived long enough to face an arraignment! Where was my compassion, my humanity? Are 'duty' and 'orders' really a good enough excuse for a dereliction of all human kindness?"

"Did the lieutenant himself accuse you of that?"

She already knew the answer of course. His memory recreated the emaciated figure in that worn, patched uniform he'd seen only in the Starfleet museum; it could not possibly have survived two hundred years of constant wear. Like the autumn trees, Reed had put on his pomp to die. "No," he said slowly. "Almost his first words were 'duty before everything'."

He took a sip of the wine. It was very good, if not one that Robert would have called a top vintage. 'Not a great wine, but nearly a great wine.'

Still holding her own glass in her hands, his companion leaned forward earnestly. "You were tempted to lie, weren't you? To tell Starfleet you went down to the planet and found Reed dead, and therefore no action could be taken against him."

"I considered it," he admitted. "When I finally saw him, it was so nearly the truth that even now I don't know whether I could have brought myself to give the order to bring him on board.

"Perhaps I would be finding it easier to live with myself now if I had told that lie from the start, and saved everyone a great deal of suffering."

She shook her head. "Your integrity is part of what you are, Captain. You would have bought a cheap solution with an expensive coin, and sooner or later you would have understood that both you and Lieutenant Reed had been cheated." She paused. "You argued with Admiral Hanson about those orders, didn't you?"

He grimaced. Indeed he had – passionately, though he hadn't revealed that fact to anyone.

"But if you had told the truth, that he was still alive, but that on humanitarian grounds you refused to act, then Starfleet would have acted. Now they knew where he was, they would have sent someone else, and the whole affair could have ended in real tragedy – for everyone concerned." She went on, overriding his response. "Ultimately the result would have been worse, not better. Your career would have been damaged and Reed would have been taken by force. You allowed him to surrender freely, gave him back his pride, his honour. That mattered a great deal to him. I know that." Another pause, and then her warm smile broke out. "But Jean-Luc, I think you must be the only person on this ship who actually believes you would have given the order to bring that poor man back to Earth."

He looked across the top of the wine-glass at her, feeling her belief in his integrity spread through him like relief from acute pain. Of course he couldn't have done it. He would have ordered Reed to remain where he was and fought the consequences, whatever they might have been. But still the decision to disobey an outright order from a superior officer would have been an agony, and he acknowledged that fact by admitting quietly that he was devoutly thankful that he'd been spared it. "If everyone else mistakes me for some kind of white knight, maybe it's vanity that I'm grateful nobody will ever know just how terrible making that choice would have been," he ended wryly.

Nevertheless, that truth of what he would have done had better not find its way into the official records. He smiled back at his companion, and deftly turned the subject. "Deanna, tell me honestly. Do you sense – anything from that phenomenon out there?"

Now it was her turn to rise and walk to the viewing port.

"I don't know for certain," she said at last. "Nothing that ... I can put my finger on as unique to it as an entity. Thoughts? No. Just ... wisps of feeling over the past couple of hours, so faint that sometimes I wonder if I'm imagining it.

"These may be its own feelings, or they may simply be mirrors of what it perceives in others. I've been trying to identify which, but when I said to you earlier about accepting our own inability to understand everything..." She gave a small shrug. "Maybe I was talking to myself as much as to you."

The memory came back to him of Son's response to Katherine's question of whether he'd called his brother wolves to meet him at the landing site: 'Not call ... feel.'

"And do you sense anything from it now?" he asked.

For a moment she didn't answer. He could almost feel her stretching out across the void with all her psionic sensitivity, seeking out any faint tendrils of contact with this vast, amorphous energy cloud that he was fast becoming to think of as indeed an entity.

"Contentment," she said at last. "Relief that the pain is over."

"You think it may actually comprehend suffering?"

"Who knows? I can't even tell if these are its thoughts at all. It may be simply reflecting those of others, though I don't think so. I think it feels, shares. Without questioning, simply accepting and experiencing."

"Fascinating." He joined her at the viewing port and stared out at the curve of the planet below, beyond which the brightness of its star was steadily increasing as Enterprise continued her geosynchronous orbit. "I've already sent in our preliminary findings about it to Starfleet," he added after a moment. "I suppose there'll be a lot more questions asked when the news gets out, particularly as regards its possible ability to extend life, but this system's proximity to the Klingon Empire renders the prospect of further study somewhat delicate, to say the least. I've been half-expecting a visit from a suspicious Bird of Prey ever since we arrived.

"But–" he sighed – "at least the historians can draw a line under that old mystery of Lieutenant Reed's disappearance at last."

"But the truth will never be known. Of what Reed was supposed to have done."

"That information was kept confidential, under Starfleet's criminal investigative jurisdiction." Jean-Luc hesitated, but he knew that Troi was trustworthy. He had already given her some of the details of the story; now he would give her the rest. "Admiral Hanson revealed some of the details to me. From Reed's initial statements, taken on board the NX-01 at the time of his initial arrest – probably in absence of, or defiance of, the advice of Starfleet's JAG lawyers, who would have known the captain could do their legal case more harm than good by interrogating the suspect on his own account. The results of this interrogation were kept pending the trial, which of course will never happen now.

"Apparently Reed and his immediate superior officer, Commander Charles Tucker, were carrying out tests in one of the NX-01's shuttlepods when they encountered wreckage that led them both to believe that the ship had crashed in an asteroid field, killing all on board.

"They were alone, many light-years from the nearest friendly planet. Their oxygen supply had been compromised and their communications system was malfunctioning. After making every effort to survive for as long as they could in the hope of rescue, they were slowly dying from oxygen deprivation and cold.

"According to Reed's testimony, he decided that it was his duty – the duty of kindness – to spare Commander Tucker the horrors of death by asphyxiation. Therefore he attacked him with a knife, and killed him, approximately ten minutes before Enterprise arrived. The ship had been absent on a humanitarian mission, and the wreckage in the asteroid field had been that of the ship whose occupants they rescued."

"Oh, no," she said softly.

"According to the testimony of others, Reed regarded Tucker as his greatest friend. He was a shy man, and probably rather a lonely one. But Charles Tucker was one of those men who have the gift of friendship. He seems to have drawn Reed out of his shell. Maybe if that friendship had never developed, Reed would never have felt driven to act in the way he did: as he saw it, saving his friend from a slow and agonising death."

"But it was still murder."

"According to the law, certainly. Lieutenant Reed thought about what he was doing, acted on those thoughts and killed Commander Tucker. He committed a premeditated crime. First degree murder.

"The only hope his defence attorney would have had would have been to argue for the offence to be accepted as either voluntary or involuntary manslaughter. Starfleet's legal team had already accepted that that would probably be the case if he pleaded guilty at the Court Martial, as he almost certainly would have done if by any remote chance he had been declared fit to stand trial. But in the event, the trial never took place and the statement may never see the light of day." He sighed. "He was trying to say something right at the end. His last words were 'I only wish – that history–'."

"History will remember him as a murderer." Deanna was grieved. "He acted out of kindness, but because the trial never happened, nobody will know why he did what he did."

"Or who brought him here, or why. Presumably the same people who put that beacon in orbit – to warn off anyone who might come upon the place and potentially rescue him and Ensign Sato."

"Sato. Yes. Her presence puzzles me." She turned to face him, her dark eyes wide and luminous. "Why was she here? She'd committed no crime. And what was that shuttle's mission? Did they strand the two of them here and crash on take-off?"

"I don't know who brought her here," the captain responded grimly, "but I intend to find out. Whether she came willingly – I can only hope so; certainly she was deeply loved.

"As for the shuttle, Son spoke about it. Whoever was in it had come back for her, but Reed and the wolves would not allow her to be taken away from them. The wolves defended her, and Reed presumably sabotaged the shuttle. At a guess, he did not intend to allow whoever was flying it to have a second try." His mouth twisted. "A Starfleet satellite and a Starfleet shuttle. There must be answers somewhere, and I'm going to find them."

"That could be dangerous, even now. We don't know who was behind this – or that they no longer have influence."

"I have no intention of refraining from trying to right a wrong for fear of 'offending the wrong people', Counsellor. Whatever happened here, there are too many indications that Starfleet were somehow implicated. I intend to put some very searching questions to the Admiralty Board. There are some good men on it who will realise how very serious this matter is. Hopefully, some answers will be found – even if those responsible for what happened to Sato and Reed are now beyond the reach of the courts, their conduct may yet be exposed for judgement at the bar of history.

"Furthermore," he continued, turning back to the warmth and light of the room, "I intend to see that as much as possible of the circumstances of Tucker's death are released as a matter of public record. Naturally the respective families will have to be consulted and their permission obtained, but I believe they will be glad to have the matter set straight, once and for all.

"I believe that was what Reed was trying to say at the end: that he was sorry that history would judge him without access to the full facts. If it rests with me, history will have the facts. And Starfleet will have to endure the consequences."

" 'Fiat justitia, ruat cælum'," she quoted, her eyes gleaming.

"In this case – yes." He picked up his glass again. "I'll propose a toast.

"To the truth. May it always be victorious."

The crystal rims clinked softly in the silent room.

And in the vase on the coffee table between them, the one open lily flower still bent gracefully over, admiring its own reflection.

THE END.