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The boy is coming home.

It's taken him long enough to get here. I've lost count of the number of times one of the women went to the window and looked out, though there was nothing to see except the front garden and the lane, and a horde of damned nosey-Parkers from the Press parked outside in it.

One of them actually had the effrontery to offer us a six-figure sum if we'd allow a photographer to be present when the front door opened. Damned fool. Our son may serve on a ship commanded by a Yank, but he's an Englishman born and bred, and we're an English family and this is our home, our castle. We value our privacy more than any damned bribe.

How long could it take them to drive him here from London? He should have been here over an hour ago. The news feed has shown him leaving Downing Street, and the announcer had said he was going 'to spend time with his family'.

The same thought has occurred to Madeleine. "Dad, what if he's had an accident on the way?" she asks agitatedly, jumping up from the sofa as though it has suddenly caught fire.

First-rate. Mary has been twittering around the place like a nincompoop since dawn, but at that suggestion she puts a hand to her pearls and grips them so hard I am afraid the string will snap.

"Your brother has managed to find his way back in one piece all the way from that wretched 'Expanse' place, Madeleine," I point out tartly. "I hardly think he's likely to have a fatal accident in the last sixty miles of common-or-garden motorway."

Nevertheless, the amount of quite unseemly interest that the Press has shown in him ever since his aeroplane landed at Heathrow Terminal Seven is an indicator that he can hardly be travelling in the proper, safe anonymity of an ordinary citizen. And of course, he is no ordinary citizen; he is the Armoury Officer of the ship that single-handedly saved Earth. In due course he can quite probably expect to be presented to Her Majesty the Queen.

These accomplishments do not, of course, reduce the seriousness of his desertion of his destiny as a Reed. He should never have travelled to America or enrolled in Starfleet, and I found it hard to forgive him for either. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to feel some pride in his ship's accomplishment, which was after all considerable, as the newspapers and broadcasts have not failed to impress upon us ever since the news of it was released. In the name of family amity I am prepared to make no mention of his dereliction of his proper family duty, at least on this occasion.

More time passes. I suspect that both Madeleine and Mary are tempted to use their mobile telephones, but proper discipline holds. The boy will arrive when he arrives, and surely it will be soon.

My daughter, however, is incurably restless. Ignoring my frown, she presently stands up again and goes back to the window, where once again there is nothing to be seen, though she reports that the sun has come out.

"I'll make us all a cup of tea," offers Mary – the most sensible thing anyone has said this morning.

The tea-tray is ready on the coffee table. She has baked a Victoria sponge, and slices of fresh strawberries sit on the buttercream rosettes carefully piped around the edge of it. Even the antique tea-service that had belonged to her grandmother has been brought out from the china cabinet.

She goes into the kitchen. Moments later, I hear her soft cry: "Malcolm!"

Madeleine and I both leap to our feet.

He's known perfectly well that those awful Press people would be encamped outside the front gate. He must have had himself dropped from a taxi up the lane and come across the field, keeping in the lee of the hedges until the house screened him from view as he crossed the garden.

At least he's had the sense to avoid making a scene for the newspapers of his arrival home.

I push open the door into the kitchen, and for the first time in seventeen years I see my son.

He is still less-than-average height, hardly a centimetre taller than his mother who is hugging him and – despite my instructions – crying. Nevertheless, it is not a boy who stands just inside the door; not the boy I remember, who left by that door so many years ago after revealing that he had betrayed the great traditions of his family and failed to make the required grade to be accepted for officer training in the Royal Navy.

No, it is no boy who stands there. This is a man, and a man who has learned to command. The thin bones of his face have strengthened, but the biggest change is to his mouth. It had been soft, vulnerable, but now it is firm – I would have said hard, but for the gentling effect of his slight smile as he returns his mother's hug.

His eyes are different too. They used to be fearful, betraying a consciousness of his own inadequacy. There is no fear in them now as they meet mine. There is simply – nothing. He watches me and needs nothing from me, not approval, forgiveness, anything. His cold stare holds me at a distance, even while he says levelly, 'Hello, Father."

When he was young, it was 'sir', as proper military discipline dictated. Madeleine had used it until she'd moved out and got her own house, at which point the young madam had declared she wasn't Junior Ranks any more and would call me what she thought appropriate. He, however, is still under (so-called) military discipline. I don't for a moment imagine he is in the habit of addressing his commanding officer as 'Jonathan', though that occasion when that commanding officer so far forgot his rank as to actually telephone us to discuss our son's dietary preferences had convinced me once and for all that whatever form of hierarchy was deemed proper for 'Starfleet', proper regard for ranks simply didn't come into it.

"Son," I reply stiffly.

Madeleine, of course, cares nothing for proper protocol. She dodges around me and – much to my disapproval – joins in the hug; she is apparently crying too. Malcolm drops a kiss on the top of her head and tells her to cease and desist. Sensible advice, which she gives no sign of heeding.

"Why don't we all go into the lounge and sit down?" I suggest. Mostly because there's a view into the kitchen's side window from the next lane, and some of the Press are in possession of photographic equipment with very powerful telephoto lenses. Unspeakable people.

"Good idea." Madeleine finally blows her nose and dries her eyes, and leads the way into the lounge. "Clever of you to come round the back, Mal."

"I've had enough of the circus for one day," her brother comments drily. Even his voice has deepened.

He sits down, and his mother pours him a cup of tea. He takes it with a word of thanks. I'd imagine it has been some time since he's had to deal with a civilised china cup and saucer.

Mary sits beside him, so unable to keep a proper hold of her emotions that she slides a hand through his elbow and practically hugs it. Madeleine sits opposite him, leaning forward to stare at him hungrily – mapping, I am sure, the changes in his face that all the years have wrought.

"Was it very bad?" she asks softly.

He puts down the cup and saucer without even drinking from it. "Yes."

"But you did your duty," I say stiffly. "You carried out the orders you were given, as a British officer should."

I mean to add that this had doubtless contributed to the successful outcome of the mission. Unfortunately he does not give me time.

"And that's all that counts, isn't it, Father?" he answers venomously.

"Of course it is," I snap. "Discipline is everything aboard ship. You were raised in that proud tradition, no matter what lax standards Starfleet may uphold. As a Reed and an officer and an Englishman, you must have known what was expected of you."

"'What was expected of me'!" He bursts into almost unhinged laughter, quickly cut off. "Oh, you have no idea what was expected of me, Father. You haven't the first damned clue.

"I'm sure you've seen the newsfeeds. Not a pretty sight now, Enterprise, is she? Like the Victory at Trafalgar or the Revenge at Flores, I'm sure you thought.

"Well, I'll leave you your illusions. And yes, I carried out my orders – however personally and professionally repugnant I found them." His eyes take on a wicked gleam. "Except on one particular occasion."

Madeleine has been nervously cutting the cake into slices, though with her gaze largely concentrated on her brother's face these are deplorably irregular. At this, however, she drops the knife.

"Mu– Mal, you didn't–!"

He picks up his cup and saucer and takes a swallow of tea.

"Muntiny, Sis?" He glances at her mockingly. "When obeying the captain's orders means the failure of the mission, and the failure of the mission means the end of humanity, are you saying it's wrong to mutiny?"

Mary squeezes his arm. Her hands are trembling. "Malcolm, whatever you may have done, I will never believe you surrendered your integrity."

I see it in his eyes, then. It comes and goes so quickly that I doubt if even Madeleine glimpses it, and the insight slams to my very heart so hard that I dare not even react, let alone reveal that I know of its existence.

This man – this man who is no longer young, for all that hardly thirty-five summers have passed since he was born – this man has betrayed himself. This man who was a proud and a loyal officer may still be loyal but he is no longer proud.

In that moment I could murder Jonathan Archer with my bare hands.

Malcolm covers the momentary awkwardness by giving his mother a hug. "I've always known you believed in me, Mum." He does not say that her belief is justified, but Madeleine hastily proffers a plate with a piece of cake on it, and so the moment is tidied over.

Good manners preclude my refusing a piece of cake when she offers me one too, though I am not partial to it. Somehow I get a piece of it into my mouth, but it tastes of sawdust.

Malcolm and I have never been close. But he is my son, and a Reed, and if I know anything of him at all it is that he is a man of honour. And for all that he sits there almost opposite with his back straight even in his family home, and his shoulders braced against the burden of authority, I know as well as he does that there is a burden of shame on them that weighs them down beyond bearing. He will not share it; he cannot. He will carry it, alone, until he dies.

What happened out there among the stars?

What command was he given?

Of course, I think first of the mutiny. But although whatever the rationale, munity is a most grave offence for any officer to commit, the fact that he spoke of it at all tells me that this is not the wound in the dark from which he bleeds. If the outcome of the mission was at risk, then it was his duty to safeguard it before everything. I am confident that any tribunal convened to weigh his conduct would find it justified in those circumstances.

Some other, then….

The newscasts have hardly paused in informing us of the hazards of the mission. There were times when I forbade the use of electronic media in the house because I feared that Mary's reason would be impaired with the worry they engendered. Did these people have no compassion for the families of the men and women who had been sent out to face these risks? Could they not simply sit and wait with dignity, trusting and hoping in those heroic few who bore the future of humanity in their hands?

My son was one of them.

I look across at him now, and I see weariness beyond exhaustion printed on his face. I see sorrow, and I have already seen the shame.

Along with the rest of the officers and crew, he has come back victorious. But it was a pyrrhic victory.

I set down the plate, with the cake unfinished, and clear my throat.

Malcolm looks back at me. I see him gathering himself, and the sight takes me back to the day when I excoriated him for his failure to follow in the family tradition of service in the Navy, and when I sent him out to the shame of a career in Starfleet.

There were never secrets between us. Nor much understanding, either, and far too little love.

"I have never doubted, Malcolm, that whatever career you have pursued, whatever exigencies may have influenced your conduct, you have upheld the finest traditions of our family and our country," I say deliberately. "I am proud of you, my son."

He has the freedom to reject me. And, I know, the strength. I will not complain. All this is years too late to influence him in any way.

He sets down his teacup almost silently, while our womenfolk sit suddenly frozen with apprehension.

For perhaps a minute we study one another. He does not move, simply considers me across his lightly linked hands. His face is void of expression, and I find myself wondering what years of pain and resentment may be boiling behind it. I did what seemed best to me at the time, but he was late in arriving home, and my sister Sherrie lives only a mile or two along the valley… On his infrequent visits to England on shore leave he always visited her first.

"Thank you, Father," he says at last, very quietly.

Too much water has swept beneath the bridge for any closeness between us to be possible. I can no more expect it than he can want it, and he and I will always be familiar strangers. But for one moment, it feels as though across the wilderness of our past we have reached out to one another and our fingertips have brushed.

I do not pay much attention to what is said during the rest of the visit. He has little time at his disposal; the Government wish to make the most of his presence, and there is still that possibility of a summons to the Palace. But when he takes his leave, preparing to brave the astonished indignation of the Press at the front gate by walking out of it into their midst, he turns to me and hesitates.

We parted in anger seventeen years ago.

For all the seventeen years, his salute in return would pass muster on the Bridge of any proud British battleship.

Mary and Madeleine are crying again as the front door opens. A tin passes from hand to hand, doubtless containing the rest of the cake – the buttercream rosettes will have to take their chances.

I watch my son stride down the path, into the barrage of shouts and clicking shutters. A taxi arrives, prompt to its time, and shoves its way with little ceremony into the crowd. The policeman who has stood guard over our privacy pushes a way to it for him, and then with more shoving and shouting, and amidst a forest of reaching cameras, the taxi breaks free and speeds away.

Peace returns to the lane; the fox has broken cover, and the hounds stream away after him. In the house there is a sense of weary wonderment – it is hard to believe now that he was ever even here.

"He didn't even finish his tea," laments Mary.

"Never mind, Mum, you gave him the cake." Madeleine – practical as ever – was the one to dart out with the tin and hand it to her, but her mother will not refuse the comfort. The two of them begin cleaning up the small debris of the homecoming feast.

I feel strangely restless.

I cannot remember the last time I visited my sister Sherrie, other than the obligatory visit on Boxing Day. She was widowed two years ago, and I thought that after the funeral she might turn to her family for comfort, but this did not happen – except that from words she has occasionally let fall, Malcolm writes to her regularly.

It was raining hard earlier this morning, but the clouds have blown away. A brisk wind is tumbling the first of the autumn leaves from the trees, and the policeman at the gate is checking with is his superiors whether his continued presence is required. I could save him the effort; the quarry has fled, lifting the siege we have endured since his return to England.

I am conscious of an unusual anxiety as I don my coat. Sherrie can be as unforthcoming as my son.

Madeleine pauses to adjust my scarf, which does not need adjusting. "I'm proud of you, too, Dad," she says softly.

She does not say why, and I do not ask. If I stop, I may think better of what I am going to do, and a Navy man takes advantage of a following wind for as long as it will carry him.

It is not until I am out past the gate and bidding the policeman goodbye that I realise she has never called me 'Dad' before.

I hoist my sail, to go where the wind will take me.

The End.