Well, this is sure going to be interesting.
Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Hicks of the JAG office enjoyed his job. He usually found most of the cases he was allocated interesting, and that was one of the reasons why he was so successful.
That said, having lived like everyone else through the horror of the Xindi attack and the months of wretched suspense afterwards, when so much as a fragment of cloud unexpectedly blocking out the sun had people on the sidewalk lunging for cover, he'd felt the same euphoria as the rest of humanity when the news came that Enterprise's mission had been successful. He'd watched as many of the transmissions as his work allowed (not many, as much of his supposedly 'off duty' time was actually taken up with case work) and seen for himself the worn and weary officers and crew returning to a hero's welcome. Not that they looked much like heroes. They smiled dutifully for the cameras, but never for long, and it didn't need a crystal ball to know that victory had come at a cost.
Twenty-seven lives. Not many, maybe, set against the number who would have died if the mission had failed; but enough, for the families for whom there would be no triumphant homecoming.
But having done his time in the military himself, Hicks knew that the cost was counted in more than bodies in caskets, even in bodies left floating frozen forever in space, denied even the dignity of a funeral service. For survivors, the full bill was yet to be presented. And for some it could be higher than they could pay.
Still, the whole world had acclaimed the victorious Enterprise crew. All over the world there had been thanksgiving services. At a guess, the officers' dress uniforms would need internal reinforcement to carry the weight of the fruit salad if every grateful country awarded them the decoration that was promised. They'd already taken their place in legend.
Which was why it had come as the shock of his life when that morning he'd been called into his Commanding Officer's office and been handed the job of defense attorney for Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, the tactical officer for the Starship Enterprise. And as if that hadn't been enough, he'd been informed that Captain Jonathan Archer was also facing the same charges, of the manslaughter of a significant (if imprecise) number of Vulcan officers and crew aboard a Vulcan starship named the Seleya.
Unlike their counterparts in the civilian justice system, JAG officers were not allowed to refuse a task that was allocated to them, unless there was some conflict of interest such as a relationship to the defendant concerned. Although the two men were co-defendants, each of them had to have a separate attorney – their individual interests might not be identical, and indeed might well become opposite; it was common for a defendant in a joint trial to agree to testify against his fellow in order to obtain leniency for himself. Plea bargaining was never pretty but it was part of the process and often served to speed it up. When rats could be persuaded to turn against each other, it was easier to clean out the nest.
Along with the rest of humanity, Ken was aware of the massive debt owed to Jonathan Archer. But his job now was to save Malcolm Reed in any way allowed by the law, and if that meant offloading any or all of Reed's guilt on to his captain and CO, with whom it should properly rest, then that was what he would do.
Starfleet invariably preferred to present itself as a non-military organization – like its 20th Century predecessor NASA, solely designed for the exploration of space – but by international law only military ships and vessels could be armed, and even NASA in its day had not been wholly proof against incursion by military interests. Starfleet personnel carried naval rank and exchanged military courtesies, such addressing officers as 'Sir' or by their rank and name, or 'Mister', which was exclusively a naval tradition. The MACOs who had been drafted in to support Enterprise's own crew in the Expanse were the ground combat element of United Earth's military, and Hicks was a former enlisted member of that organization, with his own fruit salad, going to college and law school after his stint with them and finally joining Starfleet's JAG Corps after law school as an officer. It was a token of his experience and success rate that he'd been chosen for such a potentially high-profile and sensitive case, and there were a limited number of others in his office who would be judged suitable for representing Captain Archer. He didn't yet know who would have been chosen, but would undoubtedly find that out very shortly.
If both Reed and Archer were facing a court martial, then there must be grounds for them to be charged. For most of the morning and on the way here he'd skimmed through the files to acquaint himself with the basic facts.
It seemed that during the journey through the Expanse the Enterprise had encountered the Vulcan ship Seleya, adrift and crippled. A search party comprising Archer, Reed, the ship's Vulcan XO T'Pol and a MACO named Hawkins (who'd been among the later casualties of the voyage) had carried out a boarding.
Thus far, everyone's account agreed. However, Vulcan had apparently begun by claiming that crippled or otherwise, the Seleya had still been their sovereign territory and that by entering it the Enterprise officers became subject to Vulcan law and Vulcan jurisdiction. They were also alleging that both Archer and Reed had acted in such a way that their conduct endangered both the ship and the remaining crew and finally resulted in the total loss of the vessel with not a soul saved. Though the accounts left it uncertain how many of the Vulcans had still been alive by that time (a number had almost certainly been dead by the time the boarding party arrived), it was generally believed to have been a significant proportion of the one hundred and forty-seven men and women originally listed as the ship's complement.
On Earth, maritime law dictated that salvage rights to a derelict vessel at sea belonged to the finder. No legal agreement on that score had ever been made regarding spacefaring vessels, and for certain Vulcan wasn't going to agree to one now, but they'd drawn their horns in sufficiently to agree to the case being heard on Earth by a military court, under the terms of a relatively recent Earth-Vulcan treaty that covered such matters.
The account heard and accepted by a Starfleet board of inquiry after Enterprise's return went into quite a considerable degree of detail regarding the boarding and eventual destruction of the Seleya. Although naturally classified, the documents dealing with this particular issue were deemed essential reading for the legal teams conducting the case and therefore had been released, with the usual emphatic caveats regarding access and care. Captain Archer had claimed, reasonably enough, that he had boarded the Vulcan ship in hope of being able to render assistance. What he had found was a ship full of mindlessly aggressive 'zombies' (the text naturally didn't use that particular word, but the description could hardly admit of any other term) whom he could neither reason with nor save. In the end, the only way he had been able to save himself and the rest of his boarding party was to have his tactical officer Lieutenant Reed initiate a process that effectively doomed the ship to destruction.
Enterprise's Denobulan doctor had testified (and it had been accepted even by the Vulcan delegation to the inquiry) that the crew on board the Seleya had already been fatally damaged by the trellium with which they had coated the hull. They were already dying. That, however, did not constitute any form of defense for actually causing their demise. The High Command had initially demanded that both Archer and Reed be tried for murder.
Hicks, perusing the documents in the first of the files, had shaken his head on reading this. It was quite inconceivable that however inexplicably determined the Vulcans were to hoist the Enterprise officers on a gallows, they would imagine a charge of murder would stick; their own delegation had accepted that Archer's initial aim had been to carry out a rescue, not a massacre. He could only assume that it had been made in order for them to 'agree' to accepting a trial on a lesser charge. And even then, he felt, they were on shaky ground.
Starfleet, to do them justice, had dug their heels in. Presumably there was enough evidence to justify an Article 32 investigation and a hearing to determine whether to prosecute and what the charges would be. If murder was not an option (and he could hardly imagine any way it would be), that left manslaughter – voluntary or involuntary.
He hadn't had nearly enough time to read through everything he would need to gain a thorough grasp of before the investigation proper began. So he couldn't place a bet either way on which it would be, if indeed it went that far. Personally he was of the opinion the case was more likely to be thrown out on its ear before it ever got near a court-house.
The one thing that was nagging him as the transport drew up at the gatehouse of the high security brig where Reed was being held was that three out of the four people from Enterprise who had boarded the Seleya were still available to face charges, but only two were mentioned in the documents. True, the third was a Vulcan herself and therefore presumably under Vulcan jurisdiction. It might well be that they intended to charge her separately in a Vulcan court. But still, it felt vaguely odd that there was no mention of her in the formal papers…
The team's documentation was in order; for today, he had only brought along Ensign Jenny Walters, one of his experienced aides, to take care of the paperwork and do any errand-running he might require at any point. After the usual delay while IDs and authorizations were checked and passes issued, he and Jenny were escorted inside and, rather to his surprise, taken to a private room down one of the corridors rather than the usual client/attorney interview room marked on the floor so that visitors could find their own way to it.
He'd been here before, of course, but this was easily the most sensitive case he'd ever been given. The name Enterprise was still resounding in the halls of fame. Until or unless it actually came to a court-martial, and possibly even then, Starfleet was absolutely desperate to keep the whole affair under wraps. If the media got so much as a sniff of the idea that the 'hero of the Expanse' and one of his most senior officers were being investigated on criminal charges, the fallout would be incalculable.
Guards with side-arms checked their ID passes before they were admitted to the room. The interview room itself was a long area, the two sides of it carefully separated so that no contact between prisoners and visitors was possible, except in one of the line of cubicles down the middle. All of these were divided by a sheet of Plexiglas so that client and attorney could see one another while seated opposite each other in the chairs provided. Each pair of cubicles was protected from those on either side by opaque dividing walls, affording some privacy. Telephone lines provided audio communication – just in case of accidents, the dividing wall was thick and solid.
On this occasion, however – presumably to facilitate keeping Reed's presence and identity the closely-guarded secret it was, because if he was brought into a shared area when other prisoners were being interviewed he could be seen by them – the interview was taking place in a separate room. There was no divider or phone, just a stout and well-secured chair on the far side of the heavy table, to which the prisoner would be handcuffed during the interview.
The door on the far side of the room opened and the prisoner was brought in. For the duration of his movement through areas where he might be seen by other inmates, Reed had been forced to walk not only handcuffed but blindfolded, his head and shoulders covered by a bag of linen thick enough to hide his face but loose enough not to impede his breathing in any way. It was not removed until he was guided to sit in the chair where he would be interviewed, and his handcuffs secured to it. Then the guard lifted the hood competently from his head and stepped back to where a glass partitioned area allowed him to monitor events out of earshot.
The files had contained Reed's official photograph and a brief biography and he had featured in the televised broadcasts that celebrated Enterprise's return to Earth, so Hicks was perfectly prepared for what he would look like. At a guess he would be confused, alarmed, anxious for reassurance. Apart from the obligatory legal formulae, which could not be omitted, Ken was ready with the standard assurances that his defense was in good hands. That was the first and most important thing a defendant needed to hear.
The officer who emerged from beneath the linen was not quite what he had expected. He was not confused, not alarmed and not – at first glance – anxious for reassurance. He was furious.
But nothing of the blaze in his eyes carried through into his voice when he spoke.
"Who the hell are you and what am I doing here?" the quiet English voice asked in a tone so insolent it teetered on insubordination. "And where is Captain Archer?"
Controlling his irritation at this very unmilitary conduct from a Starfleet officer who had undoubtedly sized up his rank and role in one single, summing glance, Ken introduced himself with formal courtesy. Under the circumstances, a small amount of leeway could be extended.
A small amount. Reed was a Starfleet officer and should behave as such, no matter what the provocation to forget it.
"I imagine Captain Archer is also under some form of restriction at present, Lieutenant," he added politely. "As you and he are co-defendants, he will of course be under orders not to attempt to communicate with you in any way."
The pupils in the narrowed gray eyes contracted. "Co-defendant? On what charge?" he asked, his tone incredulous.
"That has still to be established." Ken explained about the process that had to follow in order to decide if a Court Martial was appropriate. "The investigation centers around his actions and yours when you were aboard the Seleya – actions which resulted in the deaths of a number of Vulcan citizens."
There was no bluster. Reed simply blinked, as though trying to fit the accusation into any reasonable universe and not managing very well.
"We tried to save them," he said at last. "We only just got out of there alive, but we tried!"
"So the original investigation concluded, I believe. But the Vulcan High Command are not satisfied with that verdict. They have requested that a second investigation be carried out and charges brought against you based on its findings."
There was rage there, but it was contained. Instead of exploding, Reed curled his lip with ineffable British scorn: "Rubbish." And he dropped his arms to his sides (one of them somewhat hampered by the handcuff) and removed his gaze to a cold and infinite distance.
"Lieutenant. I sympathize with your feelings, but I am here to help you. Your best chance of justice is to co-operate with me."
Reed glanced back at him. An odd half-smile flickered across his face, and then with a swift reversal of attitude he leaned forward, now all wolfish attention.
"I apologize, sir." Every trace of expression had been excised from his voice; it was as cold as the hostile eyes that saw him as much an enemy as the rest of the world. "I'll co-operate fully from now on."
I'm on your side, you damned fool! But if ever the time and place came for saying that – for yelling it, if needs be – then this wasn't it. Yet.
He'd talked on more than one occasion to clients who simply didn't listen, and some who simply didn't understand. As he went on to detail what else needed to be discussed and done, he couldn't complain that this particular client wasn't listening, and for sure he understood what was being said. That total, all-but unblinking attention was so intent it was slightly unnerving.
But for all that the bio had led him to expect a very correct and proper English officer, still in a corner of his mind he couldn't help the faint, crawling feeling that something rather different was watching him from the other side of the table. The gray stare was off-putting – too calculating, too predatory. Perhaps after the voyage in the Expanse it was possible that the lieutenant was far from mentally stable enough to be wholly responsible for his actions – a possibility that the attorney filed neatly away for consideration later, when it might possibly come in useful.
And when the interview was over and both of them had taken a perfectly proper and polite farewell of each other, he knew exactly what Jenny meant when she said, in a voice that wasn't quite as steady as it normally was, "Sir, I'm so glad to be out of there!"