trans_9 | Broken Arrow [Open]

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Broken Arrow [Open]

After having his shoulder and Achilles tendon cared for in the medbay, Sam--under armed guard--had been brought back to the precinct and placed back into detention. Laying back on his cot, with his hand tucked under his head, he was lost in thought. Questions flooded his mind. Second guesses. Things he should have done differently at different moments. Wondering why he didn't see the decoy for what it was, a ploy to flush him and the rest of the conspirators out into the open. He'd missed it. He'd missed it all.

Now, not only was the Yeerk still alive--meaning that Sam and others had failed--but people had gotten hurt. He hadn't been able to see any faces, not until they'd taken him up to the medbay to treat him. But, when he got their he saw three people, two he recognized. Chaucer, the innocent author from way back in Earth's history. Stature, the girl who had stood between him and the person Schmuz was infesting when he reappeared. The last woman he didn't recognize. But, given the way Leon was hovering over her, she was clearly important to him.

At least three people were seriously wounded, not counting Jo who Sam had shot mid-range with a round of rock-salt, and not only did Sam have nothing--no dead Yeerk--to show for it, but they were all his fault.

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Near her cell was the man demonized for all of this, and responsible for all of the annoying shootings, Sam Winchester. Of all of the things though, it was really Jaime's injuries that had angered her most. seeing him as he was now though, all of that anger seemed to flow right out of her. she knew of all the people who were here with her, his conscience was the one most burdened.

"I heard what Picard said, and he was right," Katara said softly. "People shouldn't have had to get hurt for what we were doing. You wound up hurting the most people. But it isn't as if I didn't know why. I'd heard you got infested by the Yeerk before. I know that they want you to pay most, because you hatched the plan.

"But I know what its like to have someone force you to move without your consent, when they make you their puppet and you can't do a thing about it. My mind wasn't invaded, but my body was made to move, and when I broke free of it, she made my friends like that too: kids just like me, to force me to do it too. Her name was Hamma. At times like this...I still hear her laughing at me as they hauled her away to prison, gleeful that I delved into the dark side."

Sam had been arguing for weeks that this wasn't just about what the Yeerks had done to him, that it was about more than that. It was about protecting people from having to suffer through the same thing. It was about not buying into Schmuz's line about being 'forced' into going along with the plan. But, they hadn't believed him. Only the people who stood beside him in an effort to eliminate the threat that Schmuz posed seemed to. The Yeerk was telling the truth, the crew had decided. Sam was the liar. And, because of the betrayal he felt because the rest of the crew didn't even consider what he'd said and because he'd grown weary of making the same argument over and over again with nothing to show for it, Sam ignored her.

He knew people getting hurt during this whole thing was a possibility. When there was violence, there was always the chance of innocent people getting hurt. But Sam and the others had had to make a difficult choice: act and possibly hurt some people in the process, or do nothing and put the entire crew at risk, possibly hurting hundreds as a result. They hadn't taken it lightly. There had been no jingoistic calls to war, despite their determination. It'd been carefully considered.

He'd hoped it would have been less public. He'd wished that Leon would have chosen a less populated route to take the Yeerk--the fake Yeerk--to the hub. He'd hoped Leon and the security team wouldn't resort to deadly force to subdue Sam and the others. But they had chosen a public place. They had used deadly force. And Sam, specifically, had returned in kind, and now three people were seriously injured because of him.

Sam knew he'd have to live with that. He'd have to look himself in the mirror--if he ever saw a mirror again--and know that three people nearly died because of him. But, he also knew that Picard wasn't right.

The captain had asked him if Schmuz's death was worth one member of the crew, two, ten.... Picard had asked what Schmuz's life was equal among the crew.... But, to Sam, it wasn't about Schmuz's death being more important than the lives of those injured. It was about preventing Schmuz from ever endangering the lives of the crew again. He, they, weren't fighting just to kill a Yeerk, they were fighting to save the lives of the crew members who would end up getting hurt should Picard and Leon's plan fail to keep the Yeerk imprisoned indefinitely, should Schmuz ever get out.

But, in the end, he had failed. Schmuz was still alive, still a threat, and people had gotten hurt anyway and would likely get hurt again because of it.

"It doesn't matter anyway," he finally said, after a long pause.

"That's where you're wrong," Katara said, uneasy with the silence. "I don't think people should have gotten hurt, but I DO think there are things worth standing up for. In this situation, there was still a clear threat to the ship, and I still think it staying here is a threat. But if the security is willing to risk it, it will fall on their heads if someone lets it out and it invades someone's head. I'll be there right alongside you saying I told you so, right before we take it out. Though if you ask me, I think it was equally stupid to have had a fake Yeerk in the first place. It's like people got hurt for nothing, and supposedly WE showed our true colors. It seems like a pretty poor lesson to me."

Katara sighed. Second guessing herself in this situation had made it all the more maddening. On the one hand, she did think that defying security on something like this was necessary: unity was good, but independent thought sometimes got the job done more efficiently. On the other had, if Jaime had actually killed that thing, she would never have forgiven herself.

"You're assuming we'll be able to take him out if he does infest someone else," Sam answered. After all, what could anyone do if Schmuz got free and ended up infesting someone like Kon, or Kara, or Lyta, or Jean. A lot of people could die or get hurt which would make "I told you so" the emptiest of vindications.

At this, Katara's face hardened. "You'd be surprised at what I can do. The hard is more knowing who's infested in the first place. The whole idea of one walking around with a slug in the brain was the scary thing. I still don't get how the crew justifies letting something that powerful stay around, even if its in Stacy."

"They justify it because most of the powerful ones are still good people," Sam answered. "And you don't just kill or lock up good people just because they've got abilities that make them stronger than everybody else. All you can do is do what you can to make sure that those abilities aren't used against the rest of the crew. Leon, Picard, and Security think they can do that can do that by just locking it up somewhere on a ship that we don't even control. I think they're blinded by their idealism and gambling with a lot of peoples' lives."

She listened intently to this. What he said made sense to her in some places, in some not so much. But she still understood where his heart lay, and why she didn't judge him as harshly as the others.

"I get that: in the trial, it was decided that the Yeerk shouldn't be taken out because it had the rights of everyone else on the ship. The problem there is that those rights don't stand if in the past they were used to hurt people. I heard you were one of them, and you understood that most of all."

She licked her lips. "But we also failed today because we did exactly what we feared the Yeerk was doing: putting the crew in danger. We became that, and it ruined what we were working for. When I saw that, I changed my one woman course from the Yeerk to helping the people who got hurt. At that point, protecting the crew included cleaning the mess we made. You're right: Picard is an idealist, as a Starfleet captain he has to be. Leon isn't though...he did this because he had a job as an officer to keep the peace. It was obvious from the start we weren't going to win over everyone, and we ignored that because we believe it was in the best interest of the crew to kill it. We're two sides of the same coin, and when we collided with our reasons, nothing good came of it."

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