037. I see strange tales are woven about you.

Jim Brody leaned back in his chair, watching the security screens as he half-listened to the debate that Garrity and Burns were having about how hot some new actress was. He hadn't had much time on his hands to sit around and watch movies since seaQuest had returned, but if she was half as attractive as Garrity seemed to think she was, he might have to hit up Krieg for a copy of one of her vids and see for himself.

He flipped the screen input from camera to camera. Nothing unusual was going on in the mess hall or on the bridge, and the gym was empty for once. All in all, a quiet shift for -

The hatch to the brig slammed open, and Brody's jaw dropped as Wolenczak and Sutton dragged a handcuffed Lieutenant Callahan inside.

"What's going on?" he demanded as Garrity and Burns fell silent.

"Lieutenant Callahan is being arrested for treason," Lucas told him, sounding grim. "I assume the interrogation room is empty."

"Uh, yeah, of course," Brody replied after a moment's hesitation. "It's through there."

Sutton took charge of Callahan, dragging her past Garrity and Burns and into the interrogation room as all three security officers stared at her.

"Lieutenant Brody," Lucas said, redirecting Brody's attention back to him. "Regulations state that non-ISD personnel are not permitted to be present during the interrogation of ISD operatives without special dispensation from the head of our division."

"Is that your way of telling us to clear out?" Brody bristled a little, but Lucas's weary expression kept him from becoming too defensive.

"I'm asking you nicely," Lucas replied. "If you're still here when Commander Sutton comes out, I suspect she'll take pleasure in physically removing all three of you."

"She'd have trouble pulling that off," Garrity began, and Lucas sighed.

"No, she wouldn't. Trust me, you'd rather cooperate with me than be forced to learn a painful lesson from her." He paused. "Ask any of the Macronesians working on that prison station if you don't believe me."

"The station was blown to pieces. There's nobody to ask," Burns said, and Lucas nodded.

"My point exactly."

Burns and Garrity looked at Brody, who considered Lucas's words.

"You two take up positions outside the hatch," he ordered finally. "Stay out of the brig unless Sutton or Wolenczak says otherwise. I'm going to notify the captain."

That last sounded like a challenge, and he was surprised when Lucas merely nodded.

"Thank you, Lieutenant," he said. "I appreciate your help."

Brody and the two security officers disappeared through the hatch, and Lucas secured it behind them. He then sat down in Brody's chair, which gave him a view of both the screen showing the interrogation room and access to Brody's computer. It was the work of seconds to override the system, and he brought up the ISD portal interface to start an encrypted recording of the interrogation as, on the other screen, Sophie began to talk to Callahan.

"I don't get it."

Callahan sniffed. "I'm not surprised," she said, her tone implying that Sophie's lack of intellect was clearly the factor limiting her understanding.

"Oh, I understand what you did." Sophie leaned back in her chair, looking every bit as relaxed as she had that morning at breakfast. It was an act, of course, but Lucas gave her points regardless for being able to maintain it in the face of tangible proof that Callahan had been the one to betray Zeta Team. "And I understand how. What I don't get is why."

"This is the part where you try to manipulate me into telling you all the details of my evil plan, right?" Callahan was smiling, but her expression was far from pleasant. "Then I guess it's your lucky day, Sophie. I had no intention of keeping quiet forever. What's the point of killing someone like you if you can't even brag about it afterward?" She made a face. "Of course, you didn't have the courtesy to actually die, even after all the trouble I went to."

Lucas tensed, looking intently at the screen. Callahan's efforts to give Zeta Team false information wouldn't have killed Sophie because Sophie hadn't been there. She'd already been in a coma from the drugs she'd been given after they were captured on the Macronesian base.

Sophie did a better job than Lucas of hiding her surprise, but something must have shown through, because Callahan looked satisfied.

"I thought you might only have figured out part of what I did. I see strange tales are woven about you all the time at ISD, about how you start with some inconsequential piece of intel and manage to piece together the details of some vast conspiracy with it. That's typical Sophie Sutton: find a kernel of truth and then try to bluff your way through the rest, hoping you can convince people that you knew what you were doing all along. That won't work today. I'm sure you're recording this, and I want it all documented for posterity."

"By all means." Sophie's smile was no more pleasant that Callahan's had been. "I'm listening."

"For starters, maybe you should reconsider your choice of partners." Callahan leaned forward a little, her posture conspiratorial. "He's cute, but he's not as smart as people seem to think he is. The minidisc that he used to upload the virus into the Macronesian system? It had an extra line of code added to it, courtesy of yours truly, that was designed to set off the intruder alarm."

"Wolenczak never tripped the alarm on that Macronesian base?"

"Technically, I tripped it for him."

Lucas wondered if the expression on his face was anything like the one Sophie was currently wearing. He certainly felt like she looked, as though he'd been hit upside the head with a board.

"You set us up." Sophie's voice was hard. "Was that your initial plan? For the Macronesians to kill the both of us for you?"

"I didn't really care what happened to Wolenczak. I knew you would, though, so it was more like icing on the cake." She smiled, reminiscing. "You should've seen him while you were in that coma. He completely fell apart. It was actually kind of pathetic. You know, in the true sense of the word. Even I felt a little sorry for him."

At Callahan's words, Sophie's expression had sharpened, her anger solidifying and overtaking her surprise.

"And when I was still alive even after all of that hard work on your part? Is that when you decided to sell out my team?"

Callahan smiled again. "They're the only people you care about, other than yourself and your lovesick puppy of a partner. I figured that if you woke up and found out they were dead, that would be enough to push you over the edge. When they told us you'd died in Medbay, a little part of me liked to believe that somehow you'd found out what happened and lost the will to live."

That was actually sort of what had happened - Sophie's 'death' had been a direct result of Zeta Team's capture - although it hadn't turned out the way Callahan would have liked.

"You don't have any background in computer programming. I find it hard to believe that you pulled all of this off without help."

"Oh, I had help," she replied easily. "They just didn't know what they were helping me do. Intel does a post-encounter analysis after every failure or mistake, the same way the MCs do. I posed them a couple of rhetorical questions, gave them hypothetical situations to chew on. 'What if someone were to falsify an intel report, or rig an operative's minidisc to trigger an alarm inside an enemy base?' I gave them the scenarios, and then all I had to do was sit back and listen to their discussion. They gave me everything I needed to pull off my objectives. They even came up with a bunch of ways to counter what I was planning to do, so I took all of that into account. By the time I was ready to make my move, my plans were flawless."

"Why?" Sophie demanded, the force of the word nearly driving her to her feet. "Why would you go to all that trouble? What made you hate me that much?"

"I hated you because he loved you."

Sophie gaped at her for a long moment. "This is all about Pearson?" she asked finally, her tone begging Callahan to tell her she was wrong. Lucas was in fervent agreement; if Callahan had tried to kill them and their team because of some bizarre Fatal Attraction-esque obsession with Jack Pearson…

"Don't be ridiculous," Callahan sneered. "Pearson just added insult to injury. I hated you because my own father cared more about you than he did about me. He worshiped you, but he barely even tolerated me. He only accepted me into his division because he felt guilty that he was never around when I was a kid."

Lucas's mouth was hanging open as he stared at the screen. It couldn't be…

"Admiral Lowry is your father." Sophie's voice was flat, hiding her shock. Lowry had never said anything to her, had never even hinted at the possibility, not even on the day when he'd been reading her the riot act for breaking Callahan's nose. He'd seemed as amused by the situation as any of the others, giving her the distinct impression that he'd scolded her only because it was required.

"He had a fling with my mother when they were both young and stupid, and voila. I didn't even meet him until I was in high school. I went into the Navy because I wanted him to respect me." She snorted. "For all the good that did. By the time I made it into ISD, you were all he could talk about. He thinks I'm a screw-up. I was going to show him exactly what his screw-up of a daughter could accomplish with the right motivation."

"By killing off all of his best people?"

Without warning, she stood and exited the room, leaving Callahan sitting alone in her chair.

Lucas got to his feet as Sophie appeared around the corner, and for a long moment they stared at each other, in complete accord.

"She set us up."

"She's Lowry's daughter."

"And she's insane."

Lucas pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to stave off the headache he knew was coming.

"Sophie, I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with this."

"She's still a traitor." Sophie seemed to have absorbed the shock a little better than he had, and she was now considering their options. "After she tried to hack into the vault and change that code, I called Lowry to give him a sitrep and get permission to take her into custody. He didn't even seem surprised. I think he's suspected her for a while."

"But he only authorized her arrest? Not her execution?"

"Lowry can't authorize an execution until she's in his custody at headquarters," she said slowly. "If she dies on seaQuest, the only way we'll be in the clear is if she's killed while trying to escape. The admiral himself made a point to remind me of that when I called."

"Why would he bother to point out something you already know?"

"Lucas." Sophie sighed, leaning against the desk. "Lowry telling me that is tantamount to him ordering me to make sure that, one way or another, Callahan doesn't return to headquarters alive. When he said it, I figured he just wanted the matter dealt with quickly. Now I wonder…"

"…if he couldn't stomach the idea of being the one to execute his own daughter for treason?"

Sophie nodded, and Lucas sat down heavily in the chair. Lowry hadn't just told Sophie to kill a traitor. He'd told her to kill his daughter.

"It shouldn't be you."

"What?" Sophie frowned at him, not sure what he was talking about.

"You shouldn't be the one to pull the trigger, Sophie. If anyone is going to kill Callahan, it should be me."

"Lucas," she began to protest. If he was worried about this situation damaging her relationship with Lowry, he didn't need to be. Lowry only cared about results; even Callahan had come to realize that. He interrupted her before she could tell him any of that, and his question stunned her.

"Who killed Pete Morgan?"

Blood and brain matter splattered against the wall of the interrogation room, Pete's body slumping lifelessly in the chair.

Sophie took a deep breath and tried not to let her feelings show in her expression. She'd worried when she'd told him that story, all those years ago, that he might one day use it against her. She hated to admit that she'd stopped expecting the betrayal when she'd started to fall in love with him. Apparently, she'd had too much faith in him.

"I killed him." Her voice was clear and cold. "But you already knew that."

"Sophie, please." He sounded genuinely apologetic. She wasn't sure she cared. "You killed Morgan because he was your responsibility. I didn't bring it up to hurt you. I'm trying to explain. Callahan set both of us up to be killed by the Macronesians. It was only chance that we survived, but you ended up in that coma and I blamed myself." His knuckles whitened as his grip on the desk tightened. "All of this time, I believed that I was the one who tripped that alarm. I thought that what happened to you was my fault. And then when Zeta Team was captured, when Melahar and Carter was killed, all I could think was that this was my fault too. If I hadn't been so devastated by what happened to you - if I hadn't let it happen in the first place - then maybe I could have prevented what happened to them."

"Lucas." She was still angry with him for bringing up Morgan, but she couldn't help but feel sympathy for the suffering written all over his face.

"We take an oath when we join ISD to remain loyal to our division under all circumstances."

"Fidelis usque ad mortem," she murmured. The phrase itself was in the oath they'd all taken: Loyal even unto death.

"We execute traitors because they swore to that oath with their lives and then they betrayed us. If a team member betrays their team, their commanding officer pulls the trigger because they're acting on behalf of all of ISD, of every person that betrayal affected."

"I know all of this, Lucas."

"But you aren't seeing it. Not with Callahan. She betrayed you once, and she betrayed the team once, but she has betrayed me every day for the past two months." His gaze met hers, his blue eyes cold as ice. "She worked beside me every day, secure in the knowledge that she'd intentionally killed my partner and my team, and all this time she's let me believe that it was my fault. I don't care whose daughter she is. I've been her senior officer since she was assigned to seaQuest, and she is my responsibility. Let me be the one to deal with her."

He'd never handled the execution of a traitor before. It was a situation that came up very rarely, and if it had occurred on their team, Sophie would have been the one to take care of it. He'd been protected from those issues, sheltered as much as Sophie had been able to manage. Lucas simply wasn't built to deal with that sort of thing.

He hadn't been, anyway. Looking at him now, Sophie realized that he'd changed over the past few months, and somewhat to her surprise she found herself nodding.

"I would never ask you to -"

"I know."

She bit her lip, suddenly uncertain. "It has to look like an escape attempt -"

"I know." He reached out and brushed his thumb gently along the line of her jaw. "Take a walk, Sophie. Tell Garrity and Burns to stay outside and watch the door."

She turned her head to kiss his palm, wondering exactly when he'd gone from being a technological genius masquerading as an ISD operative to being a real operative who just happened to be a genius. She was sorry she'd missed the transformation. She wasn't sure yet if she was sorry it had happened. If someone had asked her four years ago, she would have jumped at the chance to turn Wolenczak into a proper soldier, but now…

What was done was done, however, and now she was just postponing the inevitable.

"Good luck," was all she said. She glanced over her shoulder as she opened the hatch. One word from him, any sign of hesitation, and she would have gone back and insisted that he let her handle this.

His gaze was fixed on the screen that showed the inside of the interrogation room, his hands curled into fists at his sides. He didn't look up.

She left him alone to carry out his duty.

The room next to the brig was an empty storage area. Almost empty, Sophie corrected herself, spotting someone in the corner of the room. He looked up as she stepped inside, and she realized it was Dagwood, the GELF who worked as the boat's janitor.

"Hello, Commander Sutton," he said in his carefully measured voice. "Can I help you?"

She entered the room, glancing around. Dagwood was mopping the deck, and based on the amount of glistening wet flooring around him, he'd just started.

"I'd rather help you," she said impulsively, looking over at the plexiglass of the aquatube that ran the length of the room. "Do you mind?"

"Mmm, no," Dagwood said slowly, puzzled. "I don't mind. What do you want to help me with?"

"I'll do the glass." She took a clean rag and a bottle of glass cleaner from his cart, holding them up for his inspection. "Okay?"

"Okay." He'd paused in his mopping and was now staring at her in bemusement. She sprayed the cleaner on the window and rubbed it dry with the rag, smiling in satisfaction as the streaks on the glass disappeared.

"This was my job when I was growing up," she said, not sure why she was confiding in him. It wasn't like her past was a state secret or anything, but she wasn't usually so chatty unless she had a concussion. It must have been all of the unpleasant surprises she'd been faced with in the last few hours. "I did all the cleaning at my house. I liked it, though. Something's dirty, so you clean it, and then it's not dirty anymore. It's easy to make a difference that way."

"Mmm. I like it, too," he agreed.

They worked in silence for a while, Dagwood mopping and Sophie wiping the aquatube's surface clean. She fell into a comfortable rhythm, and when the sound of a gunshot echoed down the hall, it actually startled her.

"That sounds like a gun." Dagwood sounded concerned. "We should call Security."

"Don't worry about it, Dagwood," she advised him, returning the rag and bottle to the cart and drawing her own gun. She wouldn't need it, of course, but she had to keep up appearances. "This is my job now."

"Okay." Dagwood still looked puzzled, but he offered her a tentative smile. "Thank you for helping."

"Thank you for the company," Sophie replied, surprising herself when she smiled back at him.