The room was the same as it had been for all of it, and both of them seemed aware that this was the last time McCallister would sit in it across from her, undertaking this review. There were fewer PADDs in front of Zobrella than there had been. Only two this time. As though most of the accounts were already closed, and these were the last pages of this book, which had been written about his command of the Odyssey. She let him settle, let him pour his tea, and then she began the way she always had, somewhere in the middle of the thought.

“Two missions left to speak of,” she said, “and then I owe you an answer, and neither of us has forgotten that. The encounter of the Talaxian-Ocampa colony on Talveya. And most recently, the matter of the alternate future Odyssey. I would like to take them in order, and briefly, because I think you will find I have already understood most of what they show me.”

“Then start me with Talveya,” McCallister said.

“You help tow an abandoned Talaxian mining station and place it in orbit of a hidden colony.” Zobrella folded her hands. “After I spent an afternoon pressing you on whether you could make anything that outlasts a threat, the very next thing in your record is a permanent installation. You went on to help negotiate a trade deal and a mutual defence pact between the colony and the Rakosans, while inviting the Haakonians to the table to peacefully recognise the colony. It was the beginning of a framework to help build and hold the peace rather than allow further conflict.” She tilted her head. “You will forgive me for noticing the timing. It reads almost like an answer to me.”

McCallister allowed himself a small smile. “It was not built as one. But I will not pretend the question had not stayed with me.” He turned the mug. “Talveya was the opposite of the coalition, deliberately so. The coalition was forged under fire, and it held exactly as long as the fire did. Prixin Station was put together while under a flag of peace, with no enemy at the gates to force anyone to cooperate. The Talaxians and the Ocampa did not need us to survive. Nothing was compelling us to do any of it, which is precisely why I wanted to do it.”

“That is interesting, because by all accounts, it was not the squadron that found the colony intentionally. Your son and Captain Duncan’s son, while on a shuttle training exercise, found it after a crash landing.” Zobrella had picked up her PADD as she skimmed over the report before her. “They became celebrities among the locals.”

McCallister nodded with a smirk he suppressed. “They sure did.”

“And you used them both to help you with opening diplomatic relations?”

Again, the commodore nodded. “I did, as the Talaxians and Ocampa had developed a strong trust and bond with them. They were our unofficial liaisons. We found a colony where two races that had lost much on their homeworlds had come together to build something so special that they felt they needed to hide it for so long. They hadn’t had any outside visitors to it. So when two young Starfleet cadets drop out of the sky and impress them with the training we’ve given them, it changed so much of what they thought about what lay beyond their world. Alfie and Jordan had a strong influence on them while they waited to be rescued. And when the colonists knew they needed to do more beyond their planet, our arrival helped facilitate that. The Talaxians, especially, had been traders, and they knew that if they were to stay safe, working with others was vital to the colony’s survival. Knowing that the Haakonians had been dealt a severe blow from the Vaadwaur in the recent conflict helped them shift their views on the surrounding region. The Haakonians are not in any position to harm them, and having the Rakosans’ backing made the deal sweeter. Bringing Prixin Station to them and bringing it online was the icing on the cake.”

“And it is named for a festival about family,” Zobrella observed.

“Prixin.” McCallister’s smile deepened, then settled into something more private. “Family, found and chosen and shared. It seemed the right name.” He paused, wondering if she would go on about what else had happened while they were there. “You will have read the rest of what happened there. The business with Max and his son.”

“The two of them exchanged, mind for mind, by an Ocampa elder who judged that they had grown apart.” A rare flicker of humour crossed Zobrella’s face. “I confess it is not a scenario the Academy prepares us to assess, but we are Starfleet officers. Weird comes with the job.”

“Yeah, it was certainly one for the books.” McCallister let out a low breath of amusement. “But there is something I want on the record for this review, Captain, because it mattered more than the comedy of it. Jordan spent two days in his father’s body, at a negotiating table he had no business sitting at, holding a fragile diplomatic moment together in front of people who believed they were speaking with Max Duncan because that is all they wanted. And when Craigen asked him afterwards how he had managed it, the cadet said he had simply kept asking himself what his dad would do.” He met her eyes. “That is the whole of what I hope I have built out here. Not the stations. Not the treaties. The fact that when a frightened young man reached for a way to hold the line, he turned to the example set by the people who raised him. That outlasts any coalition. And shortly after that, that same young man was engaged to my son.”

“Which brings us to the ship that came from the parallel universe of an alternative future timeline,” Zobrella said, and something in her tone changed, because they both knew this was the harder one.

McCallister was quiet for a moment before he spoke. “You know it all, as you were there. Do I need to recount it?”
Zobrella did not answer at first. She had gone very still. “No, but how do you think what has happened recently changed you? Or even changed your command decision process?”

McCallister took a moment before he answered, and when he did, his voice was lower than before. “You know I am not embellishing any of this when I say it was the hardest thing I have faced out here.” He turned the mug slowly. “A version of my own son appeared on our doorstep. Decades older than the young man who was on the Astra. Worn down by a future where the Borg became ruthless again, carrying a weapon that had already shattered a galaxy in his timeline. And he had crossed a universe to use it here, in our time, to end them before they could ever become what they became for him. He believed, with everything left in him, that he was saving the future. And he was arguing, to my face, for the annihilation of the Borg, a similar one I had refused for the Vaadwaur at the Battle of the Nekrit Expanse.”

He let that sit for a moment. McCallister picked up his mug and sipped from it before continuing. He had pondered over the entire encounter with future Alfie for days now.

“You ask how it changed me. It did two things, and they pull against each other, which I suppose is fitting, given that you have spent these days telling me I do not balance. The first is that it frightened me more than any enemy ever has, because he was not a monster. He was me, and my son, if we had lost and kept on losing until the losing was all that was left. I had spent a whole war telling myself the mercy was worth its cost. And there was my own child, telling me it was a luxury he could not afford, with a dead future behind him to prove it. A man can hold a conviction for thirty years and still not truly know whether it would survive contact with the worst the universe could show him.” He held her gaze. “I know now. It survived. I will not pretend to you that I did not feel it bend.”

“And the second thing?” Zobrella asked quietly.

“The second is that it showed me what the conviction is actually for.” His voice steadied. “We did not reach him with an argument. I had already learned before that you cannot argue a person out of a grief that deep. We reached him by showing him what he would have to destroy to use that weapon. His mother was still alive. His younger self, with the whole of his life still ahead of him, was alive. The officer he had married in that other future, one of your own cadets, standing there in the room. The very future he had crossed realities to protect, still intact, so long as he did not burn it down trying to save it. And he stood down. I watched my own son, in the worst version of himself I will ever have to see, make the same choice I made at the Nekrit Expanse, for the same reason. Because someone stood in front of him and showed him he did not have to become the thing he was fighting. That is what it changed, Captain. It stopped being a principle I argue for in rooms like this one. It became the thing that brought my son back from the edge of a decision that would have unmade everything. I do not think I will ever again mistake it for something abstract.”

The room was silent for a long moment.

Zobrella did not speak for a while. When she did, she reached out and, with a deliberateness that felt almost like a small ceremony, turned her two PADDs face down on the table and folded her hands on top of them.

“I told you I owed you an answer by the end of this review,” she said. “The review has now finished. So here it is, and it is simpler than you have spent these days imagining.”

McCallister waited. He took in a deep breath.

“I have been reviewing you for one reason, Commodore. The Odyssey Squadron is going to expand into a flotilla. The Pythagoras is the first of the ships that will join it, and I am certain that more will follow. And a flotilla is not led by a commodore.” She held his gaze. “Starfleet intends to offer you the rank of Rear Admiral. Every question I have put to you across these days was in the service of a single decision: whether they should. That is why I came. They wanted someone who had been involved in matters on a larger scale, but also understood the burden of command. A former high-level senior Ambassador and a Starfleet captain with clearance higher than some admirals can certainly help with that decision-making.”

McCallister sat back slowly. Whatever he had braced for, it had not been that.

“I thought,” he said after a moment, “that you had come to take me to task for the command changes. Karyn on the Odyssey. Max on the Whirlwind. Rio on the Ithaca. I had an answer ready for that.” A short, dry breath followed as he then chuckled. McCallister couldn’t believe what she was telling him. “I did not have one ready for this. I was also prepared for you to be even more ruthless over my decisions when it came to my diplomatic efforts.”

“You do not need to worry about that. The command changes were never the point, though they told me a great deal.” Zobrella’s expression did not soften, but it warmed by some small degree. “You asked me why I never once questioned your competence. Your tactics, your record, whether you could run a fleet. It is because none of that was ever in doubt. Any board can read a service history.” She tilted her head. “A commodore can be corrected. A commodore has admirals above them who set the limits. A flag officer at the head of a flotilla, ten thousand light-years from home, has almost no limit but the one they carry inside themselves. So the only question worth asking these days was never whether you could hold that much. It was who you would be once there was no one left to tell you not to. And then, at the very end, a ship came through a fissure and put that exact question to you in the cruellest form I could have devised if I had tried, and I watched you answer it with your own son’s life in the balance. You could not have arranged a better final examination. I certainly could not have.”

“And your finding?” McCallister asked quietly.

Zobrella considered him for a long moment. “That your faith is the finest and the most dangerous thing about you, and that you know it, which is rarer than either. I have spent these days trying to help your heart find balance, and I told you I could not; that remains true. The conviction that keeps you from annihilation is the same conviction that kept your family in a war. I cannot separate the two. I have stopped trying.” She held his gaze. “Starfleet asked me whether that is a person who should be given more to command, more to be responsible for. My answer is that they are precisely the kind of person who should be, and that whoever grants them that command must do so with their eyes fully open to what they are also setting loose. I intend to write both sentences. I will not write the one without the other.”

McCallister was quiet. “The Pythagoras is joining the flotilla,” he said at last. “Which means you are not only my assessor. You are about to be one of my captains.”

“I am.” Something that was almost a smile touched the corner of her mouth. “And when they needed someone first to come and weigh the impact you were having out here, I put my own name forward for that too, which is the part I was least required to tell you and most wished to. Your instinct for diplomacy is sound, Commodore. I have watched it closely over the past few days. But instinct is not the same as craft, and I have spent a lifetime honing it. I believe we can do a great deal more together than either of us would manage apart. I have commanded many ships. I have been a Federation ambassador to many neighbouring states and worlds. I could have gone to a quieter berth than the edge of the Delta Quadrant, under a person I hadn’t just finished taking apart. I chose this one because a person reaches a certain age, stops being interested in the safe thing, and becomes interested only in the worthwhile one. I found what you have built out here worth serving. That is the most honest thing I have said in all these days, and I would prefer not to have to repeat it.”

McCallister let out a slow breath, and with it went some tension he had carried since the first session without quite naming it. “When we began,” he said, “I thought you were the coldest officer I had ever sat across from. You gave nothing back. You let every silence run until I filled it.” He shook his head. “I understand now that the silence was the review. That you were never withholding. You were listening in the only way that would ever have told you the truth.”

“Yes,” Zobrella said simply.

She rose, and he rose with her, and for a moment the formality of the room fell away, leaving only two people who had spent a long while telling one another the truth.

“You said earlier that family, found and chosen and shared. You’ve given me something to consider. Nevertheless, if anything I’ve learnt over our conversations is that you have spent your whole career building that, Commodore, whether you set out to or not. A crew that became a family. A squadron that became one. A coalition of strangers who, for a single season, became something close to it. A son who, in his darkest hour, reached for the example you set. It does not always hold. You know that now better than anyone. But you go on building it regardless, because the building was always the point, and never the keeping.” Zobrella inclined her head, the last time she would do so as the woman sent to judge him. “I find that I would like to be part of the next one. I will see you at your table…’ She paused intentionally as she spoke his rank. “Admiral.”

And she left him there, in the room she had kept formal on purpose, with the cold tea and the steady stars beyond the glass, a man who had come in to be measured and was walking out, somehow, having instead been understood.