Tyvan said it all innocuously enough, but it was as if he’d read her mind. Don’t be ridiculous. He’s a psychiatrist. He’s a Listener, not a Betazoid.Garrett said, “What do you suggest?”
“To be honest? Sometimes it helps to think of us like a bunch of kids.”
“Doctor, some of them arekids.”
“Okay. So if a kid falls, what happens?”
“He cries?”
“Wrong. Most of the time, if it’s not serious and there’s not a lot of blood, he looks to the parent first. The parent’s reaction tells him how he ought to react. If the parent gets upset, so does the child. He’ll cry. But if the parent stays calm…”
“The kid stays calm,” Garrett finished, impatient now. She had a son, for crying out loud; she didn’t need a tutorial in Parenting 101. “Are you suggesting that I’m not sending them… youthe right message?”
“Depends on the message you want to send, doesn’t it? Let me put it this way, Captain. If you weren’t having second thoughts about your own abilities, or rehashing the past, you wouldn’t be human. Now I know part of a captain’s job is to dissect what she perceives to be her mistakes. Otherwise, you can’t avoid them in the future.”
“This is something peculiar only to captains? I suppose you don’t rehash?”
“After you chewed me out and spat out the remainder faster than a photon torpedo?” Tyvan laughed. “I’d better.”
Garrett couldn’t help but grin. “I didn’t mean that.I meant, in your work.”
“Oh, that.” Tyvan made a dismissive gesture. “All the time. Except you can’t keep looking to the past when you’ve got to deal with the present. My patients aren’t static, you know. They change from day to day, session to session. But I’ve learned over time that the important stuff keeps coming back up, and so I try not to worry too much about what I think I’ve done wrong. I figure there’s almost always a second chance, a third. I’m not suggesting that a doctor, or a captain, should ignore the past. But stayingin the past, brooding over past errors, will just get the doctor—and his patient—into a rut.”
“Or a captain,” said Garrett. For some inexplicable reason, she glanced at her mug of old coffee. “You think I’m in a rut?”
“Areyou? We’re both up at an ungodly hour. We’re not sleeping.”
“What’s your excuse?”
Tyvan shrugged. “I wonder if I misread Halak all along. I brood over mistakes I make with patients, things like that. And you, you’re wandering the ship, haunting the bridge. Drinking old coffee.”
“I’m just minding my ship. Putting my house in order.”
“Oh, that sounds like something Lieutenant Glemoor would love to store away in his stash of Earth idioms. You know, now that you mention a house…Freud said that whenever a house appears in a patient’s dream, the house represents the dreamer. So when we say that we’re putting our house in order, we’re talking about us.”
Garrett gave Tyvan a faint smile. “And my ship is me?”
“Why not? So, are you concerned about putting yourself in order? Not wanting to make mistakes again?”
Garrett thought of Nigel, and the choice she’d been forced to make. “You referring to something in particular?”
“Yes.” Tyvan’s brown eyes were steady but compassionate. “And you may believe I’m overstepping my bounds.”
“Then don’t,” said Garrett, a nervous flutter in her throat, though she kept her anxiety out of her face…she hoped.
“But it’s my job,” said Tyvan, gently. “Captain, your sorrow for Nigel Holmes isn’t a secret.”
Damn that Jo.“No?” she said, forcing lightness into her tone she didn’t feel.
“No, and I won’t insult you by pretending I don’t know. But you’ve lost one first officer, and you may very well lose another, and you have lost a great many other,” he paused—for emphasis, it seemed to Garrett, “other things,all in the past year or two.”
A marriage. My son. The man I loved, and may still.“And?” said Garrett. Her chest was tight, and she had to work to breathe.
“Captain, are you quite sure that you’re not obsessing about a dead man and everything you thinkyou did wrong in order to avoid thinking about the guilt and responsibility and sorrow you feel for all these other deaths?”
Garrett had a strange feeling then. She’d been prepared for—no, steeledherself against a wave of anxiety she knew was dammed up behind a fragile mental barrier. But, instead of anxiety or guilt, a wave of relief seemed to wash away the blackness tainting her mind, her perceptions. It was as if a strong wind had blown away a dense bank of clouds from her mind, and the sun begun to shine. Yes, that’s right, that’s exactly it.
But some perverse part of her—the part that didn’t want to let go because old habits die hard—said, “Sometimes all your choices are bad ones. So you choose the lesser of evils.”
“That’s not the same as a mistake. That’s just a choice you didn’t like.”
“Yes,” said Garrett. Uncanny, that’s what Ven said a week ago? Ten days?
“So you’re brooding over your choices—good, bad, indifferent. We’ll never know if they were right or wrong, or if things have worked out for the best because things will just work out, Captain. They always do. So let’s not talk about ghosts. Nigel Holmes is dead, and you’ve lost many things, but Halak is alive. What about him?”
“I don’t know. I trusted Halak…no, that’s not right. Maybe I was trying to get there, but probably I wasn’t being fair to him. And, damn it, my gut says things aren’t the way SI says.”
“But he didlie. Dr. Stern proved that, and Halak admitted to it.”
“Maybe he made a bad choice.” Garrett’s eyes slid sideways. “Tell me something. You think he murdered those men?”
Tyvan didn’t hesitate. “No. Just because he’s lied about one thing doesn’t mean that everything he’s said is a lie. I believe Dr. Stern would say something like true, true, unrelated. True, the men are dead. True, Halak lied. But the events may be unrelated.”
“But how do you know?”
“I don’t knowanything.” Tyvan spread his hands. “Call it intuition.”
“So, you’re saying, go with my gut.”
“Trust your crew, Captain, and trust yourself.” Tyvan held her gaze. “Forgive yourself. And, for God’s sake, get some sleep.”
“Now that’s…”Garrett began, but a hail shrilled. Crossing to her companel, Garrett jabbed it to silence. “Garrett.”
“Glemoor, Captain. I think you should come out here.”
At Glemoor’s tone, Garrett became alert. “What is it?”
“A ghost, Captain. Lots and lots of ghosts.”
“Sensor ghosts.” Garrett was bent over a sensor displaying the probe’s telemetry data. “Of what?”
“Unknown. There are also trace amounts of arkenium duranide,” said Glemoor, “larger amounts of ferrocarbonite. Cohesive globules of ionized plasma.”
“Well, the ionized plasma isn’t a surprise.” Garrett straightened and winced as a muscle in the small of her back complained. She inched her hand around to massage the muscle. “You have a theory about the rest?”
“Yes. This is data from a second probe. The first I set to scan after 600,000 kilometers. If the source was a neutron star, that should have been a good distance. But at 600,000 kilometers, the probe accelerated, and I lost it before I could program in a course change.”
“Gone?” Garrett was startled, her aching back forgotten. “Just like that?”
“In the blink of an eye, Captain. So I sent out another probe, easing it in and having it come to a stop 400,000 kilometers from the ship. From there, measurements of gravitational wavefronts came out with a sphere.”
“A sphere. Glemoor, the only thing that can do that is a black hole.”
“A very big black hole. Not as big as our galactic black hole, of course, otherwise we wouldn’t be standing here discussing it. That sphere measures over 500 kilometers around.”