Once they were safely within the confines of Calhoun’s quarters, Calhoun made it clear that he was not done. “If you ever,” he said, “present a threat to anyone on my ship again, you will be treated as a presumed hostile and dealt with accordingly the next time you get in range. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Captain, I understand,” he said tersely. “Again, it was just a momentary impulse. I wouldn’t have given in to it.”
“You need to learn self-control, Xyon.”
“Pardon me, Captain,” and he once again sneered the word, “but the time to lecture me was when I was growing up and you were busy instilling your fatherly values in me. Not after the fact because you weren’t there all those years.”
“Are we really going to rehash this?” asked Calhoun, his arms folded.
Xyon was about to snap out an angry response, but then he thought better of it. With a sigh he sagged into the nearest chair. “I’m sorry. I mean it; I really am. It just… it caught me offguard, is all. I had all these ideas in my head of what I was going to say to Kalinda, and all these scenarios of how it was all going to go.”
“And what you saw didn’t match up with any of them.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“Well, I can understand how it may have been…” He sought the right word, and the closest he could come up with was “… disconcerting.”
“Yeah, that was me. Disconcerted.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose and sighed. “I just… I thought we had something together, you know?”
“You did have something. I saw how she looked at you, and you at her.”
“And now it’s gone? Just like that?”
Calhoun shrugged. “It happens, Xyon. You were what she needed at the time. And now, at this time, she needs something else.”
“And it’s… what’s her name…?”
“Tania Tobias.”
“What she needs is Tania Tobias? Really?”
“Apparently so.”
“Okay, well,” and Xyon, sighing, forced a weary smile, “I guess there’s plenty of stars in the sky, huh.”
“You’ll find someone, Xyon.”
“That was the absolute worst thing you could have said.”
“As you’d be the first to remind me, I’m not exactly the most expert when it comes to fatherly interpersonal relationships.”
“Which reminds me: How’s your adopted son, Moke?”
“Barely talking to me.”
“So maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference if you’d been there for me.”
Calhoun walked across the room to a cabinet, from which he withdrew a decanter and two glasses. “Perhaps it would have,” Calhoun said. “It could well have made things worse.”
“I should be grateful, then.”
“Perhaps you should be.” Calhoun filled up the two glasses with a blue liquid and handed one to Xyon, never questioning whether Xyon would want it.
Xyon sipped from it and the edges of his eyes crinkled, his tongue stinging from the taste. “Romulan ale? Can’t they court-martial you for having this?”
“Of all the things I’ve done for which they could court martial me, I’d have to think this would be the most innocuous.”
“I suppose so. Oh: What’s up with Burgoyne?”
“Up?”
“S/he seemed oddly restrained, to put it mildly, regarding what happened with Selar.”
“Oh. That.” Calhoun made no effort to hide the fact that he was displeased with that state of affairs. “That was Selar’s handiwork.”
Xyon stared at him blankly and shook his head. “I’m not following—”
“One of the last things she did before she died was to use a Vulcan mind technique to—oh, how best to put it—numb the part of Burgy’s brain that had any feelings for her.”
“You mean she emotionally lobotomized hir?” Xyon was appalled by the very notion. “How could she do that?”
“There were a lot of things that Selar left us wondering what she could do. In the end, the only conclusion we’re left to draw is that all her actions were driven by what she felt were the most logical choices she could make. She was a hard woman to understand.”
“I’m starting to think I don’t understand any of them.”
Calhoun simply grunted in acknowledgment. He took a sip of the Romulan ale, rolled the contents around in his cheeks, and then swallowed. “All right, so… I’m not naïve enough to think that you just happened to swing by here in order to catch up on old times. Obviously there’s something you need to tell me. If you want to sit here drinking my ale for an indefinite period, I have no problem with that. But if there’s something of more immediate concern…”
“There is, actually. Something I felt you needed to know