Chapter Fifty-Two

Decision Time

General Malcolm Reed

Oh, bliss.

It's time for Doktor Frankenstein to get into action on me again.

"No," I snarl. "I'm not consenting to general anaesthesia. I don't care what you say, I'm not consenting. End of."

Despite my agreement to become an honorary member of the Tucker clan, that doesn't mean I'm likely to surrender my judgement on everything pertaining to me. Every proposition put to me is still going to be inspected from every angle, just in case, and this one sets off so many alarm bells I'm nearly deafened by the clamour. I may have gone briefly sentimental but I definitely haven't gone stupid, and this foreign world of 'trust' is one I still explore with the deepest suspicion.

After what happened the last time I was put 'out', I'll go to hell and be damned before I agree to it happening again. Bloody Trip Tucker wants me for something, and this could so easily be the moment where I wake up and find out precisely what.

I had enough of that last time – and I still remember in my nightmares exactly how I found out.

"Malcolm, that would be the least stressful route," Liz says earnestly. "This is major surgery."

I scowl at her across my defensively crossed arms. I don't think she's deliberately 'in on it' (if there is an 'it'), but she's so trusting, she'd be easy to deceive. "No."

Tucker and Salazar exchange expressive glances, and the doctor heaves a sigh of resignation. "If we can't change your mind on that, General, Ah'll give you a spinal block. You'll be fully conscious during the procedure.

"But Ah'll make one proviso. If Ah think you're startin' to panic, or go 'out' mentally for any reason – if you do anything but stay calm an' co-operate – then Ah'll sedate you whether you like it or not. For your own good, as well as everyone else's, so Ah can finish the job Ah've started."

"Last thing we want is for you to start kickin' off in the middle of major surgery, Malcolm," Tucker interjects drily. "Those're your options – take 'em or leave 'em."

I sit back on the bio-bed, my face stony; it's obvious I'll get nowhere arguing, because even I can't be sure of keeping control of my behaviour under this much mental pressure. "Very well," I growl. "I don't seem to have any choice."

Salazar gives me a speculative look, then, that makes me go cold all over. Is he already planning to just knock me out once I'm prostrated and helpless on his surgical table? If he does, there's no hole in the Empire, not even the pit of Hell itself, that's deep enough for him to hide in. I found Sallis, I'll find him, too.

"Ah can tell you're feelin' boxed in, General," he tells me, and I don't try to deny it. I may not like it, but I've grown a very little bit used to some of my concerns and worries showing, however much I may try to conceal them. Ginny has been hammering away at the idea that sometimes it's ok to let people know you're afraid. I can't say that I agree with her, but I can accept the fact that other people apparently do.

"In a couple of weeks, Ah'll come back and we can talk more about the surgery and what you can expect during your recovery," Salazar continues. "Then we'll set a date. Maybe between now and then, you can talk to Doctor East and get some advice on what techniques would be most helpful to enhance your calm so I don't have to put you under."

I can't deny that's a good idea, and I nod thoughtfully. It is possible he really doesn't want to do anything to me against my will, since presumably he too watched my expertise with a scalpel of my own and doesn't fancy being my next subject.

And since Ginny is also so adamant that it's good to ask for help (though honestly, I'm not really asking, and help isn't exactly what I want), doing so will probably earn me a few extra Brownie points with her.

"I do have one demand, though, and it's non-negotiable." I turn my face to Tucker, and it's set hard. "I want you to be there. By the bedside. From start to finish."

This startles everyone. I know, and I'd imagine Miguel does too, that Tucker is not comfortable with the insides of the human body. Without doubt Liz does; she flinches as though I'd kicked a kitten.

Still, the commodore controls his reaction. His arms are already folded, but apart from that he lifts a mildly inquisitive eyebrow. "Any chance of tellin' me exactly what for?"

My gaze is cold, my voice flat. "Penance."

Now he gives me a startled, hurt look, as if he is the kitten Liz thinks I kicked. I don't need to tell him what I mean by penance. I'm sure he knows, and I'm just as certain he's happy not to have me air this particular grievance in front of his brother-in-law. So he leaves it alone and acquiesces to my demand with nothing more than an inclination of his head.

The truth is, I'm killing two birds with one stone with this demand. While part of me does want to punish Tucker – torture him, in effect – by making him face the abomination that he facilitated, I also know he'll do his best to help me remain calm during the procedure. I don't allow myself to think about that – why I'm so sure he will, or why it will be particularly helpful; I just clamp my jaws and demand it.

Leaving this to sink in, I turn my vindictive mood towards the world in general in the direction of Damien, asking what happened to the baby.

I'm deliberately putting Tucker in a difficult situation here. I know the little bastard was euthanised, because I overheard the conversation. Unless things have changed since, however, Tucker and Liz have conspired to deceive Miguel on that score, telling him that the baby was stillborn. But he has also promised not to lie to me ... now this should be interesting. And revealing. Which way will the bunny jump, I wonder?

"He…didn't make it," Liz tells me. Unnecessarily, because I'd surely have heard something about it by now if it had.

"I don't understand." It's so much fun, watching her and Tucker squirm. I don't even care if they actually know that I overheard their conversation that first time I woke up; I'll just claim I don't remember. "I thought it was perfectly healthy," I continue, my voice earnest and innocent, with even an artistic touch of anxiety. "Any fatal deformities should have shown up on the medical scanners. Surely Phlox wouldn't have continued with the experiment if there was something wrong with it?"

"Ah examined the child, General," Doctor Salazar says, and I have to bite my lip to avoid grinning triumphantly when I realize that the commodore is willing to let his brother-in-law innocently lie for him. "He was severely deformed and died shortly after birth. It appears that Doctor Phlox–"

"We euthanized him." The commodore cuts in brutally, to my complete astonishment.

"What?" Salazar barks in indignant surprise.

"We'll talk about this later, Miguel." Tucker gives me a Look – he's not in the least deceived by my malicious playfulness, and he's not going to give me a ringside seat at the family reckoning.

"Oh, you bet your lily-white ass we will, bro," the doctor responds with a clear threat in his tone, but he seems to understand that it's more important right now to let the commodore deal with me. After all, I'm the bereaved parent – I'm entitled to an explanation. It'll help the grieving process.

"The transporter couldn't cope with two life forms when one was in the act of givin' birth to the other," Tucker explains, though the note of hard-held patience is clear in his voice; he knows far better than Salazar does just how much of a heartbroken parent I am not. "It flagged the baby as a parasite an' tried to filter him out. Once the operator persuaded it that he was a separate, livin' bein', it flagged some of his DNA as parasitic an' tried to filter that out, effectively tryin' to tear him apart in transit. By the time the operator convinced it to bring all of him through his pattern had become corrupted, and he materialized with multiple, terrible deformities. His life would have been short an' painful. We made it shorter an' less painful. It was the most humane thing we could do." He says the last bit while staring hard at Doctor Salazar.

I'm not sure why I say what I do next; perhaps because I'm so shocked by Tucker's honesty, despite the problems it will cause him with his brother-in-law, perhaps because I want to knock the self-righteous Salazar off his high horse where he sits on his moral high ground and drag him down into the muck with the rest of us. "It's probably for the best," I say piously. Of course, this brings all of their eyes to me. "You have to understand, Doctor," I continue, managing to inject just the right amount of disdain into the title to make Salazar wince without tipping him off that such was my intent. He probably thinks he's just receiving the overflow of my resentment of Phlox, and maybe he is, since he still hasn't really done anything yet to deserve my wrath. "That child, regardless of its physical condition or mental capacity, would never have lived a normal life."

"But even so…"

"But nothing!" I interrupt him, suddenly icily furious as the memories rush over me in a sickening wave. They know nothing about this, nothing – how dare they make moral judgements on a situation they don't have the faintest understanding of? "It wasn't a normal child, it was a human-alien hybrid, conceived not in some daft act of love, or lust, or even raucous debauchery, but in a precisely planned, coldly calculated assault, the likes of which you should be grateful you only think you can imagine. It was created in a test tube and implanted in me as a parasite, during an episode of repeated and violent rape, as part of an experiment to oppress, possibly even exterminate and supplant, humanity.

"You're thinking of it, you're talking of it, as if it were a human child, as if it could have been rescued – as if it was open to reason, to kindness, as if it was one of us! Well take it from me, and I know as much as anyone except Alpha himself could possibly know, that wasn't the case.

"If things had gone to plan, it would not have been raised as a child but trained as a princeling, taught to rule, to kill and to conquer. As soon as he reached sexual maturity, he would have been made to breed with multiple partners or his sperm would have been harvested for artificial insemination. His bloodline would have been spread, forcibly and throughout the Empire, his DNA mass-pattern bombed into the human genome.

"After eighteen or twenty years, give or take, he'd have challenged his father – and by 'father', I mean his sperm donor, not me, the incubator that kept him alive for his first nine months; he would have challenged his father for supremacy, because given his genetic make-up he could do absolutely nothing else. Only one of them would have survived the fight, and that one would have spent the rest of his life watching over his shoulder for the next upstart kinsman to attack him. And so it would go on, and on, and on, the disease of their life cycle spreading throughout the whole bloody empire. Don't kid yourselves it would have stopped with humanity, either; Phlox was already experimenting with combining Alpha's DNA with Klingon, and I'm guessing that once he'd got that done it'd have been a short step to Vulcans and Romulans. You just think what that little trick would have achieved if it had succeeded."

Looking from Tucker to Cutler and back again, I say, my voice like iron, "You did the right thing, and not just for me."

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