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Director's Cut / Re: [Stardate 57714.5: May 12th, 2381] - Boldly they rode...
Last post by Ellen Fitz -Enyd stood before the assembled team with the data chip resting in her open palm like it weighed considerably more than its physical mass suggested, which it did. She did not fidget with it. She did not look down at it. There was a specific category of discipline that came not from training but from the knowledge that if you let yourself look at the thing in your hand, you might let yourself think about how it had come to be there, and that particular line of thinking was not available to her right now. She had filed it. She would retrieve it later, when the architecture of the immediate crisis was no longer load-bearing, and she would sit with it properly. Just not now.
"The chip contains internal Tal Shiar communications," she said. Her voice came out even, which was a miracle considering how much she wanted to scream and cry over everything that was happening around them. "Encrypted directives from Tal'aura's inner circle. Proof of contingency plans targeting both Romulan and Reman leadership. Assassination authorizations. Fabricated intelligence designed to sustain and prolong this conflict past any natural conclusion." Her jaw tightened. "It demonstrates that this war was never meant to end in any outcome that involved either side winning. Only in an outcome that involved Tal'aura's faction retaining control over both."
She let that land. One of the things Cardassia had taught her — among the many things she had not asked to learn— was the particular importance of letting a true thing have the silence it deserved before you moved past it.
"Kino Jeen died ensuring we had this opportunity," she continued.
The words were steady even as her mind's eye saw the woman's blood pooling around her body. Her gaze moved across the team, cataloguing — it was involuntary by this point, the near-eidetic habit of her mind committing faces and postures to memory in the way it had always committed things she might need later, whether she intended to or not. She had come to think of it less as a gift and more as the brain's stubborn refusal to let her travel light.
"So." Her hands found their way behind her back, which was where they went when she needed to look more authoritative than she currently felt. Her grandmother had told her once that the difference between confidence and the appearance of confidence was smaller than people thought, and that in a room full of people who needed to believe you knew what you were doing, the appearance was almost as functional as the real thing. Almost. "Non-lethal force whenever feasible. Stuns. Disables. Contain and move on. You do not need to be gentle about it," she added, because she had learned that teams sometimes heard non-lethal and interpreted it as tentative, and tentative got people killed. "Efficient is fine. Thoroughness is encouraged. Theatrical is unnecessary and time-consuming."
She allowed a small pause. "And in case it was not sufficiently obvious — do not hesitate to neutralize a threat that requires neutralizing. I will not have any of you killed for the sake of optics. The optics will survive." No objections. Good. "The reason for the restraint is practical rather than sentimental," she continued, which was not entirely true but was true enough to be useful. "It is going to look fairly remarkable — and I mean that in the original sense of the word, the sense where people remark on it because they cannot quite believe what they are seeing — if I stand in front of Donatra and ask her to lay down her arms and abandon a thalaron weapon while we have just spent the last hour carving a path through her crew. Diplomacy requires, at minimum, the appearance of good faith. We will do our best to provide an actual version of it."
She had watched diplomacy attempted with insufficient good faith on Cardassia, and she was aware of what insufficient good faith produced.
"When I reach Donatra," she said, and her voice shifted into something that was not softer exactly but deeper, the register she used when she was saying something she had thought through to the bottom of, "I will tell her what is on this chip. I will tell her that the manipulation is documented and over. I will tell her that there is an opportunity — a real one, not a Federation-constructed one, not a trap — for a ceasefire. For Romulan and Reman forces to stop killing each other long enough to look at the same evidence and decide together what they want to do about it."
She was aware this was, by any realistic assessment, an ambitious goal. She was also aware that every significant diplomatic outcome she had ever been part of had looked, at some point before it was achieved, like an ambitious goal.
"Theurgy will remain neutral in any talks that follow. We will not dictate terms. We will not install leadership or advocate for particular outcomes. The Romulan and Reman people will determine their own future — but they cannot do that if they have annihilated one another today." She took a breath. "A ceasefire buys them time. Time to verify the information on this chip independently."
Her grandmother had a saying about the difference between winning an argument and winning a war, and the relevant part of it was that winning a war required your opponent to still be standing at the end of it, capable of choosing to stop. You could not make peace with rubble.
"Donatra is not a fool," Enyd said. "By now she has almost certainly detected the same long-range sensor readings we have — additional Starfleet vessels en route, intentions unknown." Her gaze sharpened. "She does not know if they are coming to help us, to stop us, or to complicate everything in ways no one has fully anticipated yet. Neither do we. A ceasefire also gives everyone on this side of that uncertainty time to prepare rather than escalate. This is, if nothing else, a case where buying time is genuinely valuable and not merely a delay of the inevitable."
She looked to Zark for a moment — an unspoken exchange, the kind that developed between people who had survived things together and no longer needed to narrate all of it.
"While I negotiate — with Commander Zark at my side — the rest of you will proceed to the thalaron weapon. Do what is necessary." She emphasized the word deliberately and let it stand alone for a moment. Not reckless. Not performative. "Stop it." She exhaled once, slow and even. "I would very much like to believe that this ends with everyone making reasonable decisions and no further bloodshed." A small, dry quality entered her voice — not flippancy, but the particular kind of honesty that came out sideways when the situation was serious enough to require it. "I have, however, been doing this work long enough to have a fairly calibrated sense of how often that is the outcome. So." The dry quality receded. "Assume the worst. Hope for the best. Keep your heads. And stop the weapon."
Her fingers closed around the data chip. "Let's go."
