Part 36 (1/2)
”It's a personal touch, Sivak.”
”Whatever excuse you feel compelled to give to cover your inability to remember how to use the intercom from day to day is- ”
Gesturing to the inside of her office, the president interrupted her a.s.sistant. ”Come in, please, Doctor, we've got a lot to talk about.”
Emmanuelli got up and followed the president in. Seated on the couch was the very same chief of staff she'd spoken to before, Esperanza Piniero, as well as Chirurgeon P'Trell. I guess I should've expected Ghee to be here, Emmanuelli thought with a sigh. They weren't going to make it easy on her.
Well, I'm not gonna make it easy on them, either.
”Have a seat,” the president said as she herself sat in one of the chairs perpendicular to the couch.
Rebecca took the chair facing the president, grateful that Bacco had given her the opportunity to sit face-to-face. The president could just as easily have chosen to preside at her desk, with all the power that conveyed. Instead, she was treating this as a conversation among equals, even though it most a.s.suredly wasn't. Rebecca truly appreciated the gesture.
”My head speechwriter has this thing for old, dead languages. He likes to put references to them in my speeches. Half the time I take 'em out, since I don't think it's such a hot idea to try to convey something to people by using words they're not gonna understand. But thanks to him, I know all kinds of odd bits and pieces in Latin and ancient Greek and the like. So I know a certain phrase that goes, primum non nocere. It's the start of an oath you- ”
Rebecca had intended to interrupt much sooner, but it had taken her this long to screw up the courage to do so. ”Madam President, with all due respect, I think throwing the Hippocratic oath in my face is cheap.”
”Maybe it is, Doctor, but so's what you're doing.”
Aghast, Rebecca asked, ”I beg your pardon?”
”You're not the only one who took an oath, Doctor. I took one a little over a year ago, and it said that I would lead the Federation and do what was best for its people.”
”And how does my operating on a Tzenkethi fulfill that oath, ma'am?” Rebecca asked in a tight voice.
”First of all, it's not 'a Tzenkethi.' It's a two-year-old boy named Zormonk. Secondly, the Tzenkethi have been at loggerheads with us for decades. We fought more than one war against them, and they still view us as some kind of evil empire that has to be stamped out of the galaxy. Not a day goes by without our press liaison coming across some piece of anti-Federation propaganda from the Tzelnira.”
”Ma'am, I'm aware of what the Tzelnira are capable of. In fact, I think I know better than anyone in the Federation, to say nothing of anyone in this room.”
”True. I know what you went through was horrible, but- ”
”Horrible? Ma'am, it would have to improve by several thousand orders of magnitude before it got as good as horrible!” Realizing that she was yelling at the president, Rebecca took a breath and said in a softer voice, ”I'm sorry, ma'am, but you have to understand what they did. It wasn't just that they held me prisoner, and it wasn't just that they forced me to treat their sick and injured. They only let me treat certain people-certain important people, who were worthy of it. I had to let two women, one man, and three children die because they weren't of the right social caste while I wasted my time operating on the cousin of one of the Tzelnira who had no hope of recovery, no matter what I did, which I told them over and over, but they forced me to do it anyhow, and he still died. And then, when the armistice happened, they told the Federation I was dead and kept me there. My husband remarried, my children grieved for me-and then when I came back, it destroyed my husband's new marriage, and my children blamed me for lying to them. So ma'am, please, don't presume to tell me that you know anything about what I went through.”
Somehow, Rebecca managed to keep her composure. It helped that she had been rehearsing this very confrontation for the past two weeks. She felt like her chest was about to explode, but outwardly she remained calm.
The president sat and listened to everything she said. Then she picked up a padd from the table in front of her. ”For the last five days, we've been getting more reports from Tzenketh-things about the son of one of the Tzelnira being kidnapped by the Federation and being experimented on.”
Unable to contain a snort of derisive laughter, Rebecca said, ”Ma'am, if you're trying to convince me to perform the operation- ”
”I'm not finished.”
In a small voice, Rebecca said, ”I'm sorry, ma'am.” She suspected she had tested the president's patience as much as she was going to get away with.
”There've been statements from almost every member of the Tzelnira. The one exception is Zaarok. His son's the one who's supposedly been kidnapped, yet there's nothing from him.” She set that down and picked up another padd. ”Technically you're not cleared to know this next part, but I'm invoking executive privilege. This is a Starfleet Intelligence report that indicates that Zaarok has been secretly put in prison for sending Zormonk to the enemy.” She put that padd down. ”You yourself just said you know better than anyone else in this room what a Tzenkethi prison is like. This is a member of the most privileged cla.s.s in Tzenkethi society, and he's cooperated with his people's greatest enemy and allowed himself to be imprisoned because he wants his son to live.”
The president stood up. So much for being on equal footing, Rebecca thought.
President Bacco started pacing back and forth. ”I can very easily order you to do this, Doctor. So could Chirurgeon P'Trell, and you'd be obligated to follow it or face severe consequences. But I'm not going to do that, because that would defeat the whole point. If you performed this operation under duress, or went to prison because of it, then it would be just like what the Tzenkethi did to you. And there's no way I'm going to allow something like that. Instead, I'm asking you-I'm begging you-to look at what Zaarok did. He made a choice. He put aside his own people's prejudices, went against every principle that the government he represents lives by in order to save a two-year-old boy who never did anything to anyone.”
Stopping at her desk, the president leaned against it. Rebecca noticed that she was leaning right next to a rotating holo of a young girl who resembled the president but definitely wasn't her. There were other pictures too: an adult with the same face as the girl, whom Rebecca realized was the president's daughter, along with three children; another of just the children; and finally a wedding photo of two people who were neither the president nor her daughter. Rebecca suspected that the president stood by reminders of family on purpose.
”We have such a great opportunity here, Doctor. For the first time ever, we have a chance to bridge the gap between the Federation and the Tzenkethi, to show that our people can work together for the greater good instead of perpetuating the evils of being opposed. But the only way that's going to happen is if you go back to Starbase 1 and save Zormonk's life. If you don't, then we've got someone else unjustly placed in a Tzenkethi prison, a dead child, and an enemy that will be more vicious than before, because they'll have the corpse of the son of a member of the Tzelnira who died under Federation care.”
The president walked back over to the chair and sat down. ”Understand something else, Doctor-if you still refuse, then that'll be the end of it. There'll be no reprimands, no censure, no blackballing. Chirurgeon P'Trell and I have agreed that you have every reason to hate the Tzenkethi and what they did to you. You can go right back to Starbase 1 and continue your career without any repercussions.”
Rebecca found that impossible to credit. Even if there were no official repercussions, she knew that lines would be drawn. Some would view her as the one who'd refused to save a child's life. Others-those who'd fought the Tzenkethi or knew those who had-would support her, telling her she'd done the right thing.
This one decision would define the rest of her life.
She thought back to the look of anguish on Raphael's face when he'd introduced her to the woman he'd married two years after she'd been declared dead. The overwhelming feeling of joy she'd felt when she'd materialized in the Saratoga transporter room. The knife-twist of Daniel and Gustavo's anger, projecting the bile that only a teenager could muster at a mother who they thought had abandoned them. The horror of watching those six people die so she could perform a pointless operation. The bone-sore agony of her cell, a cold, windowless room where she'd lived between treatments, with only a flat piece of cloth and two buckets for furniture.
Then she thought about Zaarok, whom she'd met more than once in her time as prisoner, who'd referred to her as the ”pet doctor,” sitting in a cell just like that one.
The thought gave her immense pleasure.
However, Zaarok, she suspected, would remain in that cell no matter what happened. He had violated Tzenkethi law, and he had consorted with their worst enemy. No, his suffering would be long and hard-and it would be made worse by the knowledge that he'd failed, that his son had died.
And then she thought about Daniel and Gustavo, who hadn't spoken to her in fifteen years. Yet if she found out they were sick and that only a Tzenkethi doctor could save them, what would she do?
Just what Zaarok had done.
She realized something else as well: If she refused to do this, she was finished as a physician. The president's a.s.surances notwithstanding, if she let a patient die due to her own negligence, she would have violated the very oath the president tried to guilt her with, and she would no longer be worthy of her medical degree-in her own mind, if in no one else's.
”All right,” she said in a small voice.
”I'm sorry?” the president said.
Louder, Rebecca said, ”I'll do it. G.o.d help me, I'll-I'll do it.”
Esperanza felt like a black hole had opened up in her stomach. She got off the turbolift on fifteen and walked slowly toward the president's office door.
Sivak gave her one of his looks. ”The meeting has already commenced. President Bacco has expressed surprise at your tardiness, and also instructed me to- ”
Ignoring him, Esperanza went into the president's office. Ashante, Myk, Dogayn, and Z4 were all present, as were Fred, Admiral Akaar, Safranski, and Raisa Shostakova.
”About time you got here, Esperanza,” said the president, who was leaning against the front of her desk. ”We- ”