It felt as if he were living in some kind of alternate reality.

If Phlox had been available to be his confessor, he might have admitted how his own helplessness was gnawing away at his nerves. He might even have admitted to being unable to sleep and asked for help – whatever the hell was going on, he needed to be at the top of his game to deal with it. As it was, he reminded himself grimly that he'd become used to dealing with far less than the usual requirement of rest during the months of searching for the Xindi. Some days back then he'd thought it was only coffee and blind determination that had gotten him through it, and even when he'd finally dragged himself away from the control room and the endless hours of speculation, calculation and data studying he'd stumble into bed craving for oblivion only to lie there staring hot-eyed into the darkness for hours on end, feeling the weight of the mission bearing down on his shoulders till the bones of his soul cracked.

His initial meeting with his JAG attorney, a Commander Ralph Sinclair, hadn't improved matters much. Sinclair was a second-generation Scot, whose square face was slightly softened by a magnificent set of beard and whiskers. As these were pure white he might have looked a little like Santa Claus, but there was nothing soft about him, and his very blue eyes had a piercing glitter. His bearing was so rigidly military that part way through the interview Archer had found a part of his mind wondering idly if the guy's spinal column could actually bend.

Still, there was no doubting the commander's competence or his determination. And without holding out any guarantees (not that Jon would have accepted them if he had), he'd seemed confident enough that there was a lot the defense counsel could work with.

Starting with the fact the whole thing's a pack of damned nonsense, the captain would have said, but right then he was concentrating on keeping control of himself and giving his complete attention to what he was being told. If he'd once started to say what he thought about the situation he couldn't have guaranteed he'd have kept a hold of his temper.

The more he'd thought about it, the more ridiculous the whole thing appeared. Setting aside for the time being the fact that but for Enterprise's success Vulcan would sooner or later have been just one more of the worlds swallowed by the expanding Delphic Expanse, and the High Command were guilty of staggering ingratitude on that score, he simply couldn't get his brain around the fact that somebody – anybody at all – could seriously believe that he'd deliberately caused the deaths of the poor wretches aboard the Seleya.

He regretted their deaths; that went without saying. It had been a cruel discovery that the only way to get his own people off the doomed ship was to condemn it to a premature end, though from a starkly practical point of view it was maybe just as well that it hadn't been left to be found by any of the pirates who made a living in the Expanse – there wasn't just whatever of value the Vulcans might have left intact, there was the technology too, and it was a mission imperative in wartime to deny any technology to the enemy. The Xindi must have been pretty technologically advanced anyway to be able to build and deliver a weapon that could destroy Earth, but regardless of that, he couldn't have taken the risk of giving them anything else that might strengthen their war capability any further. If the ship couldn't have been gotten back into working order he'd have had to order it blown to smithereens once any possible rescues had been carried out.

As for the Vulcans aboard, even though Phlox said the poor bastards were long past saving, they'd been alive; they wouldn't have wanted to die. He'd tried to comfort himself that in their rational minds they wouldn't have wanted to live in that state, but the trellium had put an end to any hope of being rescued from it.

Once, a long time ago, when he'd been helping out at home by painting a window frame, a spider had jumped out of a crack in it just as he dabbed the paintbrush down. What could you do? You couldn't pick the poor creature up and wash it in turpentine. But he'd hesitated for a long moment before he reversed the brush and put the spider out of its misery, and afterwards some of the joy had gone out of the task.

And now someone, somewhere, believed – or said they believed – that he'd actually wanted the Seleya's crew to die.

Legal processes were always agonizingly slow. However hard patience came to him, he had to simply wait for the wheels to turn; there were processes. 'Pretrial conferences' – meetings between defense and prosecution, meetings between his and Malcolm's attorneys. Each side cautiously weighing each other up, testing to find out the negotiable areas. Each meeting seeming to achieve nothing but dragging out the interminable wait.

Sinclair, asking questions, endless questions, so that even though for hours of the day he'd wished for the guy to arrive to break the monotony and bring some hope of progress, barely moments after his arrival he was wishing himself alone again.

The latest visit had been that morning, and had been the longest and most exhausting yet. His attorney had made him go through, step by step, checking and re-checking every detail, everything that had happened from the moment Enterprise received the automated distress call from the Seleya to the moment they'd returned to the ship and he'd had to run full-pelt to Sickbay pushing a gurney with a raving XO trying to get off it and strangle him. "We need to have your version of the events, Captain," the attorney explained levelly. "Written reports, even by the participants, tend to be filtered by the participant. Going through it with you in person will help me prepare the nuts and bolts of the defense."

Grimly Jon recognized that this was undoubtedly something that he'd have to endure in court – if it got that far – so it was good practice in keeping his temper, even when the guy went over and over some apparently superficial point as if somehow trying to catch him out in a lie.

Then he'd had him describe, in minute detail, everything he could remember about Malcolm's actions on board the Seleya. Then, as smoothly as a snake, the incriminating question slipped in: 'In your opinion, based on your years of experience as a commanding officer, did Lieutenant Reed fail to exercise due care?'

Yeah. Sure. The Malcolm Reed who'd put himself on report if he left out the period at the end of a routine departmental performance summary.

"No," he'd snapped.

'I'll ask you to consider, Captain, if it's possible that Lieutenant Reed simply felt that less 'straightforward' avenues of escape held out less guarantee of safety, and deliberately manipulated events to leave only the one option available?'

Yeah. Sure. The Malcolm Reed who'd looked at him in horror when he ordered 'necessary' torture, who'd recoiled when he ordered 'necessary' theft.

"No. It's not."

'Based on your observations since you took him on as the Tactical Officer aboard, would you say that Lieutenant Reed has occasionally displayed a somewhat 'cavalier' attitude to the use of weapons? Have you ever thought, shall we say, he's a little too eager to "shoot first and ask questions later"?'

Riled, he'd automatically gone to deny it. Malcolm might be borderline paranoid about having his precious weapons kept 'shipshape and Bristol fashion' and prompt enough to use them when ordered to, but though he was invariably happy about shooting inanimate objects, the day he'd been ordered to destroy the defenseless Xindi monitoring station he'd sat there afterwards with a face like gray granite, not uttering a word. But then treacherous memories intruded of how often he'd had to rein in the guy's enthusiasm for toting weapons everywhere they went, even down to gently sidestepping his suggestion of using explosives to blow open the hatch of the drifting Axanar ship before trying the unlocking handles.

He'd hesitated. And that hesitation hadn't gone unnoticed. The attorney had made a note on his pad.

It hadn't dawned on him at first where all these questions were leading. From the start, he'd taken it for granted that he and Malcolm would be mounting a joint defense. Then, when it did, he'd almost exploded with disgusted fury: "You want to try and get me off by blaming my tactical officer?"

"For the purposes of the enquiry, Captain, my ethical obligation is to raise all defenses possible for my client, including shifting blame to where it belongs," Sinclair had replied calmly.

"You see these?" Jon had almost yelled at him, pointing to the rank pips on his uniform – even though he was temporarily 'relieved of duty', still he found a perverse pleasure and a kind of comfort in wearing his flight suit every day. "These mean 'the buck stops here'! Whatever Reed did, he did because I gave the orders!"

"I admire your loyalty, Captain, but there is always a possibility that in the heat of the moment even the most devoted officer can exceed his remit."

"No." He shook his head vehemently. "You can forget it. It was my responsibility to take him there and whatever else happened, he was there because of me. And I'll testify on his behalf in front of any Court Martial you wind up representing me to."

Sinclair looked back at him. Incongruously framed by the Santa Claus hair and beard, the stare was suddenly that of a basilisk.

"Then, Captain, I believe there are certain consequences of that action you need to take into consideration." A tiny, ominous pause. "Bring your toothbrush with you when we go to court."

=/\=

Long after Sinclair had left, Jon sat there motionless, not even bothering to put on the lights as dusk gathered and darkened.

The attorney had done his job of sowing the seeds of discord. He probably knew something of the fetid silt he had had to disturb in order to do so, but he could go home happy the deed was done.

Reed was no saint, Jon told himself. He'd shown that in the Expanse, committed mutiny against his captain and gotten away with it; the episode had been passed over during the investigation with hardly a murmur, as if it didn't matter at all that the whole cadre of his senior officers had taken his command from him and seen him brought low by a squirt of damned Insectoid jello.

They hadn't understood. None of them had, none of them possibly could have understood, what it had been like to carry that weight on your shoulders. It had been easy for Malcolm to show the horror he felt at the orders that had made him an accessory first to torture, then piracy and finally murder; what did he think it felt like to actually be the one who had to give those orders? Sure it was easy to hold up your unbloodied hands when it wasn't you who had to lose a little more of your soul with every step further away from what was morally permissible. When it wasn't you who had to look at the guy you'd given the orders to and remember that every time your eyes locked.

But for all his damned 'professionalism', Reed still hadn't been able to hold it together completely. That stupid fight with Hayes, the two of them acting like kids in kindergarten! What the hell had gotten into the guy? Didn't he get it, how imperative it had been for the two of them to get along? How difficult it was for their teams to learn to cooperate when they saw their department heads beating the shit out of each other? Did he just have to make the results of his completely unprofessional feud with a fellow officer into one more problem to dump on the shoulders of a CO who already had more than enough?

And as if all that wasn't enough, somehow it seemed that he'd slipped into the vacant place as Trip's best buddy too. Sure, there had been that business with the cogenitor, and that had done damage, but – somehow, they would have got over that. Time healed most things, and Trip knew how badly he'd been out of line. Sooner or later he'd have come around.

But it seemed that was no longer an option. Now instead of seeing Trip alone most days as he made his way to the captain's mess – waiting, perhaps, for the jerk of the head that said C'mon, what are you waiting for? – he was more likely to see his chief engineer sitting opposite his head of Tactical. They weren't always talking, but more often than not they were, and with an ease that brought into harsh focus his own complete inability to make the reserved Brit open up about anything.

Even as he found himself dwelling on these dark thoughts, Jon had the grace to feel ashamed of himself. Set against the devoted service Malcolm had given him in every other way, he couldn't help but be aware these were pretty pitiful excuses for turning on the guy.

However, if it became necessary…

'That's what it may come down to, Captain.' Sinclair's voice echoed darkly in his ears. 'Him or you.'