I'll give T'Pol credit, she maintains a glacial calm. "He's not on board. You must have sensors that can confirm that."

Unsurprisingly, perhaps (I'd like to think it's a nod to our resourcefulness, if not to our total honesty) Silik doesn't believe her – or his ship's sensors, which seems a bit harsh on his own technology. "If you don't tell me where he is I'll have no alternative but to–"

"Come see for yourself, or send your soldiers. You'll realise I'm telling the truth."

Silik glowering is even less attractive than Silik gloating or Silik scowling. He orders us to drop out of warp and prepare to be boarded, and cuts the transmission with a lack of grace that makes Commander Shran look a model of suave urbanity.

Well, I'm not having that. "Security teams to docking ports one, two, and three." They'll already be armed and waiting thanks to the signals I sent as the ship was put onto weapons readiness, it shouldn't take more than a minute for them to get into place.

But my people will hardly have taken two steps in response to my order before T'Pol – now acting Captain – countermands it.

Trip is clearly outraged. "Are you crazy? How do we know how many Suliban are coming aboard? They could try to take over the ship!"

She gives him the Vulcan glacier too. "There are thirty armed vessels surrounding us. Unless I'm mistaken their weapons are still targeting our warp core.

"Mister Reed?"

I'd like to be able to back Trip up, but not one of those weapons has either unlocked or powered down. I nod miserably.

"So, unless you have a better suggestion?"

He hasn't. I haven't either.

So we all sit waiting while the enemy boards Enterprise, and there's fuck-all we can do about it.

=/\=

Trapped.

I don't especially suffer from claustrophobia. If the place was slopping with water I'd definitely have a lot more of a problem, but even so, as soon as the lock clicks into place behind me the bulkheads in my mind start to give way.

I know the place is escape-proof given how little we've been left that I could use to pry a way into the door controls. For maybe half an hour I prowl around the rooms – my own bloody quarters, I should know them by now! – trying to look at them with new eyes and work out some way, any way, that I could get out of them.

I need something to do. I need something to think about.

I need – something – or I'm going to start…

Fire.

Hell falling from the sky.

Burning is an awful death. You cook from the outside in. I've seen bodies of people caught in a conflagration, and unless they were lucky enough to die from smoke inhalation first, the twisted corpses tell their own tale of the suffering they endured before their brains boiled and their hearts burst with the pressure.

Thirty-six hundred people.

Men. Women. Children.

Pets. Wildlife. Plants, a whole ecology blasted out of existence.

All that achievement, all that potential; all that wonder of Life spreading and adapting. All those hopes. All those dreams.

In all the missions I did for the Section, they never asked me to annihilate an entire world, and here I've done it all on my own, completely sterilised a world teeming with life and turned a thriving colony to ash – by mistake.

No, it wasn't by mistake, at least not my mistake. I did everything I was supposed to do; in fact I exceeded the requirements of the safety protocols. Every sensor log proves it.

It wasn't my fault.

So why do I feel so completely responsible?

Why does the knowledge that I neither planned it, nor even (technically speaking) executed it, not make me feel the slightest bit better?

Why does every one of those thirty-six hundred deaths hang around my neck like the Ancient Mariner's albatross, weighing me down as if I not only knew but connived at them? Why, even now, when I've tried so desperately hard to separate myself from everything I was and did for the Section, do I feel as if somewhere in the ledgers of hell there's another notation of Mission accomplished after all the rest of the crimes I committed with the lame excuse that I was obeying orders?

Perhaps if I could cry it would make a difference. Here in this enforced privacy, a temporary abandonment of the stern dictum that Reeds don't cry might be forgivable. But maybe there's some kind of justice in the fact that even when the appalling knowledge of my own involvement in – if not direct responsibility for – this monstrous, despicable crime finally crashes over me in the tidal wave I'm no longer able to hold back, I find that I can't even weep. Though I produce husking, broken noises as I sit on the edge of my bunk, folded over and hunched in on myself like an animal with a mortal belly-wound, my eyes remain dry.

A priest once told me that tears are a gift from God. How appropriate it is, then, that here in this nadir of my fortunes I receive the final proof that even God has washed his hands of me.

I don't know how long I stay that way – not long, because almost at once the anguish is replaced by a dreary acceptance of the fact there's no forgiveness to be had – but then I start pacing, feeling my mind now so precariously balanced between grief, rage and helplessness it feels as if my skull's in danger of bursting. I want to hit something, hit it so hard and so often my fists will crack open and bleed. If I can't get out of here soon–

The broken squawking from the door comm jerks me back to some semblance of sanity. My pulse racing, I dart to it.

It's certainly not operating in the normal way – that will have been cut off from the operations control on the Bridge. But after what's probably a certain amount of trial and error at the other end, I establish communications with our enterprising Commander Tucker, who has bent his resourceful mind into getting around the problem of not being able to talk to each other and by routing the signal through the EPS grid has achieved the ability to talk to any doorbell on B Deck.

At least the news that he's OK is gratifying, though he's equally unable to extricate himself from his quarters and it appears (worryingly) that Sub-Commander T'Pol is 'unavailable'. Given the fact that her quarters too are on B Deck that suggests she's not locked in like we are, which leaves the question of where she is and why.

Travis and Hoshi are on C Deck. Trip now appears to be concentrating on trying to get hold of them too, and then with any luck we'll have a go at getting ourselves out.

Leaving him to carry on with his technical wizardry undisturbed – I only wish I could help, but I'm sure he'll let me know if there's anything I can do – I go into the bathroom, where I wash my face and hands and glare myself into some kind of appropriate discipline.

This has been the first reckoning. There will be more. And they'll be bad, if not quite as bad as this one.

But in the meantime, I have a ship to try to save.

And that comes before everything.