While Making Other Plans:
Chapter 31

  Kathryn hugged Maggie so tightly that she had trouble breathing.  “Ow, Mom,” she struggled to get out, “you’re hurting me!”

  “Oh, oh right, I’m sorry,” Kathryn muttered as she pulled away but kept hands on her daughter’s shoulders, unable to break contact.  She was crying enough for her vision to become obscured by the tears to pool up over her eyes in the microgravity and she had to wipe them away, leaving large wet blotches on the arms of her coveralls.  She’d never let Maggie see her in that state before, but the truth was she’d rarely if ever even been in such a heightened emotional state of relief, grief, and exhaustion rolled together.  “I thought, I was worried that—"

  “I know Mom, I know,” Maggie said with some apparent annoyance as she took one of her mother’s hands into both of hers.  “But I’m alright,” she assured her.  “We all are, see?” she said, gesturing a hand towards Felix behind her.  He had brought Maggie to meet her at the Orbital One airlock, and seemed fairly emotional himself at the relief of seeing his best friend again.  “Where’s dad?” Maggie asked, forcibly pulling herself away from her mother’s tight embrace.  Kathryn pushed herself over to pull Felix into a bear hug next and the spun together for a few moments as they hugged tightly.

  “He’s…” Kathryn remembered and pulled herself away from Felix to turn back to her daughter.  “Have they told you about Kobol yet?” she asked.  A look of confusion came over her daughter’s face.

  “We’d only just found out before we heard you were on your way,” Felix said.  “I’m sorry, we— I, didn’t know if we should tell her when it was so close to seeing you again.”  He seemed apologetic, but more ashamed.  She knew him long enough to guess that what he was truly sorry for was that he just didn’t want to have to tell her.

  Kathryn took both of Maggie’s hands and closed her eyes and took a  moment to draw in what resolve and calm she had left in her.

  “Oh god, he’s not dead is he!??” Maggie exclaimed with sudden violent horrible despair as she added things up to that being a likely possible explanation for everyone’s behaviour.

  “What?” Kathryn looked and met her eyes with alarm.  “No!  Oh god Sweetie no, nothing like that, I’m sorry to make you think that.  Your father himself is fine but… Fuck.”  The image of Jaren violently apoplectic over the attach flashed across her mind.  “It’s Kobol, his people, your family there…”  Kathryn swallowed.  Maggie had spent a lot of time on Kobol, she had relatives, friends.  She was to be a bridesmaid for her half-sister there in a few months, they’d picked out a dress already.  “Kobol was attacked by the enemy Bobbins Maggie, the ones who attacked you.  They…” she shook her head, not sure how to put it.  “It was completely destroyed.  There are reportedly few if any survivors who aren’t here already.  We’ve sent a relief mission but early reports are—” she stopped, it clear on Maggie’s face how little more information she could attempt to absorb.  “I’m sorry Maggie, I’m so sorry.”  

  Kathryn tried to pull her daughter into another consoling hug,  but was held at arm’s length by a firm hand on her chest.  Her expression was one of numb disbelief, her eyes searching for answers that didn’t exist, a way it could not be true or made to make sense, but there was no sense to make of it.  Not the kind she was looking for anyways.  Kathryn remembered that her response was alloyed with her own experiences at the hands of the enemy and just wished she’d let her hug her.

  “I want to help in the relief efforts.” she finally said in a tone that made it clear she didn’t consider it up for debate.

  Kathryn looked down, searching for a way to satisfy both her daughter’s understandable instinct to help as well as her need to keep her out of harm’s way.  “I’m not saying no,” she offered, “I understand.”  She gently took Maggie’s hand off her chest and held it both hands as she lowered it.  “The first responders are already underway though, and we still don’t know exactly what they’re going to find when they get there.  After they’ve conducted an initial survey and have a clearer idea of the kind of help they’re going to need, if there’s a way for you to safely help you can, okay?”

  Maggie’s despondent shock was beginning to give way to anger, reminded Kathryn how she reminded her of herself sometimes.  The immediate urgency of now always taking precedence over the roiling undercurrent.

   Keeping hold of her daughter with her right hand, she pulled Felix into a hug with her left, resting her head on his as she hugged him tightly with one arm.  “How’re you holding up?” she him.

  “What me?  Oh I’m fine…” he answered somewhat distantly.  “Pissed off and pretty eager to punch back though.”

  “Amen brother,” Kathryn chuckled, despite herself. “Amen.”

  “When will I see Daddy again?” Maggie asked.  Maggie hadn’t called him that in years and Kathryn found it both heartwarming and incredibly sad.

  “’I’m sorry sweetie, I honestly don’t know.  As you can imagine he’s… upset.”  Another flash of him in that state across his mind.  “We left him in the Koboli system to listen for any signals distress or otherwise while we checked the other systems.  We feared the worst, we didn’t know if—”  She decided it wasn’t necessary to burden her with all that.  “We needed to make sure the other colonies were okay,” she finished.

  Maggie sniffed and nodded thoughtfully.  She seemed to understand.  “We sent the first relief vessels through right away though, and I’m certain he would have insisted on joining them for the first close survey of the planet.  Why don’t you record a message for him?  I’m sure he’s been told you’re okay, but I’m certain he’d be relieved to hear from you and want to answer right away.  If you go with the second relief wave, you’ll be able to meet up with him there.”

  Kathryn noticed Margaret standing in the airlock behind her, waiting uncharacteristically patiently for the human drama to work its way through.  Ralph stood behind her, almost seeming to be hiding.  She also noticed a single Bobbin eye stalk watching them from around the corner.  She looked back at her daughter and sighed with the weight of two galaxies on her shoulders.  “I’m sorry Maggie but I need to get back to work now.  There’s a lot going on.  Things are moving quickly and your mom’s right in the middle of all of it.  Forgive me?”

  Maggie looked up at her with wet wide eyes.  “Go get ‘em,” she softly answered.  "I’m gonna go get ready to go help on Kobol when I can.”

  Kathryn nodded with an understanding smile before turning and trading her Mom hat for her Admiral cap.  She looked around for the highest-ranking officer in the room.  Finding a lieutenant commander, she motioned him over.  “I need two things,” she told him.  “I need you to assemble every senior Star Fleet officer and civilian government official on the station in the general assembly room, and I need a secure path from this room to the assembly.   Station a heavy guard at every possible access point.  Not a single soul is to allowed to see our guest here accompany us on our way there, do I make myself absolutely clear?” she asked.

  She saw the man look past her for a moment towards the weird looking robot and eye stalk peering around the corner behind Margaret.  “Yes sir,” he stiffened as he answered.  “Not a soul ma’am, aye.  Give me just a few minutes, they’re already waiting for you in the assembly room though.”

  “Thank you, Commander.”  She answered before turning back to her team at the airlock.  “Well let’s get on with it then.”

   

  Kathryn, Felix, Margaret, Ralph, and Bob, all stood behind the partitions which backed the stage of the general assembly room.  It was modeled after the old UN general assembly in old New York, back when the station was in use by its original builders and it would sometime function as an alternate meeting space as the prestige of the old United States declined and nobody could agree on another nation’s city in which to host it.

  Before she could go on stage to introduce Bob and answer all the questions they must have about her comprehensive report she’d sent ahead during the transit back to Earth, she received a transmission on her scroll marked with the highest personal priority, a permission she had only granted to Jaren, Maggie, Felix, Margaret, and always her immediate superior in the chain of command.  It allowed them to send a message which would insistently sound a tone even if she’d set her scroll to ‘do not disturb’.  It was Jaren.

  The message was also marked both ‘Private’ and ‘Top Secret’ and carried the heaviest encryption available.  She excused herself to the far corner of the waiting area behind the stage, and popping on her PANE display glasses and privately started the message playback after entering her security code and allowing the scroll to run all the required biometric scans.

  “Kathryn,” he started, blessedly looking a bit more human than the last time she saw him.  His earlier uncharacteristic cold distance had given way a more genuine mixture of anger and grief, but now seemingly accompanied by some degree of acceptance and resolve.

  “I am relieved that the other colony systems were largely untouched.”  She was grateful to hear that despite his loss and personal grief he was still able to express this sentiment.  It meant he was beginning to come back from whatever dark place he’d been pushed to.  He then sighed with a depth that made her own heart sink before he continued.  “But Kobol is…” he looked away, “it’s gone.  There’s just nothing left.  No survivors.”

  She paused the playback for a moment to absorb the blow.  She’d known this was a possibility, likely even, but she’d still held out hope that it wasn’t true.

  “We’ve made contact with a few stragglers who were on ships throughout the system and able to keep their head down enough to avoid being attacked.  They were all older ships with no anti-matter aboard, it’s probably what saved them.”  Made sense, she figured.  She was still waiting for what he had to say that required the high level of security attached to the message.

  He looked down and away from the camera and she sensed a note of shame in his expression, but it was hard to tell because she couldn’t remember ever knowing him to be ashamed of anything. “You were right about my people,” he offered, then added: “…about me.”  “We didn’t trust you, the other colonies.  Not trusting others was baked into our civilization from the beginning.  We valued the alliance… but we couldn’t let ourselves lose the upper hand in it.  We couldn’t risk any possibility of being overcome by aggression no matter how reliable you became as allies, no matter how closely we worked together.”

  “Get to the point Jaren,” she whispered.  “Get to the fucking point, what are you trying to say…”

  “We built up a strategic reserve of anti-matter weapons in secret and hid them in such a way that they couldn’t be detected.”  Kathryn’s face dropped in disbelief at the scale of the deception, the depths of his and his people’s distrust and xenophobia, and the scope of which she’d never fully understood until it came into full clarity now.  She had to push back hard against her hope against what she desperately needed him to say next, but why else even bring it up?

  “I know how this must sound to you, what it must say to you about Kobol, about me…” he offered, the obvious shame even deeper now.

  “Get to the fucking point Jaren!!” she whispered angrily but too loudly to remain a whisper, and she saw the others look over at her with concern.

  He sighed heavily, and then finally came out with it.  “I dispatched one of the relief ships to check on the depot after it became clear that there was nothing we could do to help anyone on Kobol.  The measures we took to conceal it from you must have worked on them too, because it’s still there.  All of it.  Tonnes of anti-matter, thousands of warheads ready to fire.  I wanted to keep Kobol out of the fighting.  I knew we’d become their primary target if this came out and I wanted to keep us safe.”  That sharp angry edge which had been unfamiliar to her a few days ago came over him again.  “But now I just want to do everything I can to help kill as many of them as I can and defend what we have left.”

  “I guess you were right, pacifism is for fools…” he stated bitterly before ending the message.  Once his face left the screen it was replaced by a map of the Koboli system with a marker indicating a moon of the outermost gas giant as the stockpile location with the text ‘Haun’s Mill’.

  “Only past a certain point, Jaren.” Kathryn mourned as she pushed the scroll closed and stared into space past the others looking back at her expectantly.  The brightness of the screen left her momentarily blind in the relative darkness while her eyes adjusted.  She couldn’t decide if she more wanted to be angry at the Koboli for keeping doing something like this and keeping it secret and her dismay at yet another nail in her marriage’s coffin or be elated at what this meant for the war effort.

  As she walked back over to the others, she reopened the scroll and opened the message again, then pressed it to Felix’s chest.  “You should all see this,” she said before leaving them before passing through the curtain out to the stage without saying another word.

  The cacophony of angry, panicked shouting became more pronounced as it was no longer muffled by the heavy curtain.  She tapped on the microphone until the room grew quiet and they looked up at her expectantly.

  “I imagine everyone in this room knows who I am and has read my preliminary report.  There is now more I need to add and clarify, and afterwards I’ll answer whatever questions I can.

  “First off though,” she said, bracing herself by holding either side of the lectern, “it is my sad duty to inform you that I have received a communique from Jaren Snow in the Koboli system.  A detailed search has shown that while there were a handful of survivors scattered across the system, the Koboli colony itself has been completely destroyed with no apparent survivors.”

  The crowd exploded with raucous, frantic panic.  She gave them a few moments to feel the weight of the news before tapping on the microphone again and bringing their attention back to her.  “So obviously, my deepest particular sympathies to the Koboli in the room.”  She heard what she’d come to recognize as a Bobbin squeal of excitement off stage and figured it to be Bill learning of Jaren’s report and the secret anti-matter stockpile.

  “I implore Star Fleet and civilian leaderships of the other worlds to do anything, to commit any resource in assisting you however we can, to safeguard and care for all the survivors, and to preserve whatever we can of your people’s culture.  You are among friend,” she offered more softly, before clarifying: “among family.”  

  “And as you learned from my report, while we have new enemies, we also have new friends whom I hope we might one day come to call family as well, if extended family.  Come on out her Bill.”

  Kathryn stepped over from behind the lectern to stand side by side with Bill and hold his hand to demonstrate her newfound friendship with the strange creature.  His black eyes darted about nervously on their stalks as the crowd erupted again, this time half in anger, half in denouncement of him.

  “And because the Koboli are our family, we must understand and forgive what I have just learned from Jaren.  I’m sure every high ranking Koboli in this room knows what I’m talking about and is unsure if they should share, so let me help you.”

  She took a moment to sigh heavily.  As hard as it was for herself to accept, it was even harder to break it to her own people.  The upper leadership were pragmatists and appropriately more skeptical of the Koboli and their motives, but on the whole the Roma and Havenites believed in their coalition.  They really believed that they were making strides towards genuine trust with their interoperation.  The cooperation Star Fleet itself represented and the intergovernmental coordination in exploring Earth and bringing Orbital One station back to life were all manifest symbols of that hope.  While she now had to shatter some of that illusion, given what had happened to Kobol it also somehow didn’t feel like it mattered much anymore.

  “The Koboli kept a secret stockpile of anti-matter weapons,” she bluntly told them.  “They built and hid enough of them to easily win a multi front war if the rest of us ever joined forces against them.”  She leaned in a little closer to the microphone as a cacophony of gasps and angry shouting rose in the crowd at the news.  “And it’s still there,” she told them.  “They missed it,” she added with a slight smirk.  “It’s all still there, thousands of warheads ready to fire, warheads the enemy ships are completely defenseless against,” she raised a finger to emphasize: “‘if’ integrated into Bobbin weapons systems.”  The crowd grew louder as the shock and anger at the Koboli subterfuge was gradually giving way to patriotic zeal.  

  Kathryn got even closer to the microphone for her voice to be sure to carry over the increasing noise of the crowd.  “Thanks to the Koboli we have the means to take the fight to the enemy, to strike back in their name.  Because of them, we have a chance to save the rest of us from the same fate, but we have to work together.  We must dare to trust our new allies!”  

  The crowd was growing to raucous jingoistic fervor.  Personally and so deliberately inciting such bloodlust made Kathryn deeply uncomfortable on some level, but she knew the stakes.  They had stumbled into a conflict which on one hand offered galactic peace and prosperity in victory, and certain extinction of the human race in defeat.

  Pacifism had its limits.