The junior officers have stories to tell--the deeds of their fellows, their commanders, some of them well-known names--most commanders are well-known. Cadets and junior officers talk a great deal about commanders; it’s important to know about the next person who might hold your life in his hands. A lucky few of them have stories about the legends. They’ve been assigned to the Enterprise. They piloted Admiral McCoy’s shuttle in his last years.
The commanders usually go to the back. They know it’s not easy to relax when your captain’s at the party, no matter how friendly and laid back your captain is. There’s still this line, this divide. Oh, it’s permeable. It’s even transparent at times. But once you cross it, there’s no going back to where you were. And there’s no real knowing the far side until you’re there. All the mental exercises in the world--all the textbooks and autobiographies and descriptions from professors and guest lecturers, all the essays about what you’d do in this or that situation, all the holodeck simulations--none of it really prepares you. Nothing and no one can tell you what it feels like to be the final word for a crew of one thousand, five hundred, a hundred and fifty--even a team of five.
You get a taste of it your first day in the big chair--even leading your first away mission. It’s a bit intoxicating and a bit terrifying. If you’re well-trained, it’s mostly a sense of obligation and responsibility. You can get that feeling as an engineer leading an away team, as an ensign holding the Con on the night shift. You can stick a hand into the divide, and most of us don’t get it ripped off. Our COs are more careful than that. They take better care of us . . . they introduce us to command gradually, to prepare us as much as to test us. Run a department, lead an away team. Then, one day, you find yourself in charge when all hell breaks loose. You can’t contact the ship--or there’s no time. The call has to be made and you’re the only one who can make it. That’s trial by fire. You just can’t duplicate that feeling on a holodeck, nor even during survival training in a real environment. There’s always someone with more experience monitoring you, watching over you, ready to step in if you get in over your head. Starfleet is too paternal--maternal--to let you sink if you can’t swim.
Few become first officers who haven’t survived a trial by fire--it’s pretty much a given that you won’t be granted that sort of position until the real world--the real, unpredictable, unmonitored world--has had a crack at you. There’s no other way to guarantee an officer has what it takes. Those of us who are given command have faced the test and have also spent at least a few years under the everyday yoke of command as XOs--the organizing and delegating, the routine running of a ship or station. But always, there’s the captain--there’s one more rung on the ladder above you where the buck really stops. The last word. The final authority. Where the real responsibility falls. Any shit that goes down, it ultimately lands at the captain’s feet.
As a first officer, you get a really good sense of that. When something goes wrong, you see the weight of it on your captain, even if the captain’s not technically at fault. You try to take it away, ease the burden. It’s your job to protect the captain, after all, but you can’t ease that weight. It’s hers to bear. Even when she knows she’s not truly at fault, she’s still responsible. You feel your own guilt, but the captain can ease that sense of culpability for the first officer. The first office can do it for everyone else. But there’s no one who has that power for a captain. Sure, there are commodores and fleet commanders and admirals and an entire hierarchy at Starfleet command, but not one of those people can relieve the weight of responsibility from a captain where her ship and crew are concerned.
Yeah, you get a sense of that as a first officer. It can make you reconsider your career track. Not all first officers are going to be captains. You can certainly learn a lot as an Exec. You can become prepared to be a captain in that position. But you have to have what it takes to command in you already. There’s a point beyond which no amount of training or experience will give you what it takes. You have to have that last measure inside yourself.
When you take command, you understand it the first time you step onto your bridge. You see what’s on the far side of that divide. You’ve become the last word and everyone around you, everyone behind you and below you on that ship--a hundred, five hundred, a thousand--is your responsibility. It’s an awesome feeling. Sure, it’s a little heady, but that’s not what I mean. I mean it’s heavy. There’s no gradual realization, no introductory trial period at this point. You step aboard your ship, you walk onto your bridge, take the chair, and even before you’ve opened your mouth to give your first order, it’s settled on you--dropped on you. It’s yours. The ship, yours. The people, yours. Every decision, yours. The weight drops on you.
Still, you don’t how heavy that load can be until you get into trouble. And there’s always trouble eventually. When the lights are out and the only illumination is the hellish flashing of red alert and the flames consuming the forward stations, when enemy fire is pounding into your ship, your people are bleeding, and your whole world is shaking apart around you--that’s when you know. When the next minutes are going to determine whether your crew lives or dies, when every second means a life, and you’ve got to make that call--make any call--determine in a second how best to protect your ship and crew, or at least the greatest majority of them, that’s when you first understand what command means.
There’s no going back after you’ve experienced that. It affirms the decision that granted you the big chair, it affirms all you’ve worked for and all you’ve tried to prove--that you have what it takes--it affirms the very essence of who you are--or it breaks you. It’s not often that the brass make a mistake about an officer, put someone in the chair who can’t handle it. If an officer doesn’t feel she’s got what it takes, she doesn’t accept the command even if it is offered. If you don’t have it, the idea of being in the big chair is scary as hell. It’s not often that a captain is wrong about whether she has it or not. The few times it’s happened, when a captain broke at the crucial moment . . . those are the ones we don’t talk about.
But there’s endless talk about the rest of us. The cadets recount our successes and our failures--yes, failures. Just because we prove worthy of our command doesn’t mean we never fail. There’s a difference between failing and breaking. They analyze our missions, our decisions, in their classrooms. They’re supposed to learn from it. But late at night, away from their professors, they really speculate. In the dark hours, alone with each other, they can say things they wouldn’t dare say in class. Junior officers do this too, but their talk is more experienced. They’ve been out there, working without a net. Hopefully, their superiors have always provided that safety zone, but it’s not always possible in the real world. It’s more personal when you’re talking about the person that controls your own life. It’s no longer hypothetical. And it’s harder to see things as black-and-white as the cadets still can.
Officers begin to take a measure of pride in their superiors within their first few weeks out of the Academy. It becomes a competition. Officers love to compare their COs, brag and compete to have the best story, the best captain. Loyalty is intense, especially for a crew that’s been through the fire with its captain.
I’d be interested to hear the talk about me--the speculation, the analysis, even the stories told in the competition for bragging rights. When I took command of Voyager, I expected a certain degree of automatic respect from my crew. I had four pips on my collar and it had been a lot of years since I had the gleam knocked off. That’s how we talk about a new CO--hasn’t had the gleam knocked off her pips yet. But it was important to me that my people respect me personally--not just the rank--that they trust my decisions and follow me not just because I was the captain but because they knew me, and, what they knew of me, they found worthy. I’ve always wanted that, but on Voyager, it became more important to me than it ever had been. Still, I always demanded respect and obedience from the day a new officer came aboard my ship. The ironic thing is that the one time I didn’t automatically command respect from my entire crew was on Voyager. Like I said, Voyager was an interesting command. Unique. In many ways.
I don’t care what many people think about me these days, but I am curious. Mostly I’d be interested to hear what they say when they speculate about which command, which mission, was the one for me--the one that made me. And I know they talk about me. I feel the hunger in the eyes that follow me. I know I’ve stepped beyond the pall that separates the majority of officers and even commanders from the ones who are really interesting--for seasoned officers as well as the lower decks. I’ve moved into the realm of legend.
If a civilian stumbled into the rarified air we think hangs in the shadow of Headquarters and entered one of the bars we patronize, if he walked up to a wide-eyed junior officer who’s keeping one eye on me and the other on the compatriots he’s whispering with and asked this young person about me--Hey, what’s the big deal? There’s a hundred of you in here this very moment. I count five admirals in my line of sight. What’s so remarkable about her? --what would the answer be?
I think I’d sidle up to this befuddled civilian and buy him a drink. If he asked me why half the eyes in the room were on us at any given moment, I’d shrug elaborately and buy him another. Maybe I’d say, “They’ve never seen anyone order tea in here.” Then I’d suggest he find another place to drink, one where the air is not quite so rarified, not quite so thin, where the shadow of Starfleet is not so heavy and it’s altogether a little easier to breathe. Maybe I’d help him find that place and let him buy me a drink. But no. This is the sort of air I’ve evolved to breathe.
Besides, hungry eyes can’t digest me anymore. I’m inconsumable these days. Used to be that those sorts of looks directed at me sapped me. Feeling that all those officers wanted something from me was draining, even if all they wanted was just to get to know me or to hear me speak, even if it was just a nod of acknowledgement or a second of eye contact. I felt like I was lacking, a disappointment to them, just human and not enough to go around. Now there’s enough of me for everyone and it takes nothing away from me or those I command. That’s what happens when you become a legend.
I wonder what they say when the debate rages over what command, what mission, what moment was the one. Do they say I was born to it? Do they say I grew up Starfleet with an admiral for a father and never had a thought of being anything else? That’s true. My father was an admiral and I never wanted to be anything but a Starfleet officer. No childish dreams of pink tutus or healing sick puppies for me. It was always the stars. They know these things. It’s common knowledge. Much more about me is common knowledge than is the case for your average commander--or even the other living legends. Most of the legendary officers had to wait until some writer dug into their lives after they were dead, read their logs, interviewed their friends and crews, and wrote a biography--not that they were eager for it, I imagine. I never was. That was never part of the dream. It was always just about the job.
Do they recount how I convinced Owen Paris to be my thesis director when I was only a sophomore and how I became his protégé and served under him once I graduated? Do they talk about my scientific work, my doctoral thesis? Yes, I was a good student. I studied like hell and it was never anything but a joy. Yes, I was practically a recluse during my Academy days, never interested in the social scene, always focused. Yes, I even turned down Will Riker--another legend, and once one of the ‘Fleet’s playboys, a rising star even then--turned him down to work on my thesis. Yes, I had the balls to present myself to Owen Paris as his next thesis candidate, and, yes, I impressed him so much that I became his protégé. Anyone could have done that, all those things. Starfleet officers are, by definition, bright and bold.
Maybe they drop their voices to a whisper and refer delicately to my capture, along with Admiral Paris, by the Cardassians and speculate about the torture I endured at their hands. That I was taken prisoner is common knowledge, too; again it’s more than would be known if the media hadn’t made such a great fuss when Voyager came home. I was captured and, of course, they tortured me. I would tell them all about it, if they asked. If one soul had the balls to ask, I’d reward him with all the details he could stomach. The cage where they kept me in my own filth, how I learned to tell time by their beatings--until they realized I was doing it and made the beatings random because it’s more frightening when you don’t know when it’s coming. I could list for them the broken bones, from head to toe, or in order of the significance of the injury, from the rib that punctured my lung to the third finger of my left hand. I could tell them that all of that was candlelit romance compared to the psychological torture. Hearing the screams of my colleagues, being told they’d be killed if I didn’t give them an answer to a question--answers I didn’t have--being presented with fake treaties in which the Federation vowed to abandon any POWs in Cardassian control in exchange for sectors of space, planets, mere promises of non-aggression. The day when they fed me, after days of giving me nothing, even water, and then convinced me a child I’d been hearing cry all week was the main ingredient in the stew. I retched until nothing, not even bile, would come up.
Then they gave me a knife and invited me to kill myself. I almost did it, but when I had the blade at my carotid, I spotted my own vomit, the chunks of half-raw meat I’d barely chewed, thought about that hopeless crying and went for the Gul instead. I didn’t care about living anymore, but I wanted to take him with me. That was when they shattered my cheek bone and ripped my right shoulder out of its socket. I think I got the concussion when the guard threw me against the wall. After that, when they did actually feed me, I couldn’t make myself eat anything with meat in it. They noticed, of course, and started giving me nothing but meat. And when I was so hungry that I knew my body was soon going to make me eat no matter what my brain thought, they convinced me it was all human flesh. Once I even saw a little piece of a Starfleet uniform in the food. Fortunately, we were rescued before my stomach overcame my horror. I’m not sure I’d have ever been the same if they’d gotten me to eat what I thought was the flesh of another person, possibly even my own CO. The rescue team found the speakers that piped the crying into my cell. There’d never been any child there at all.
Oh, I could give them things to whisper about. I could make their blood run cold. But they wouldn’t want to hear about lying in your own excrement or no longer being able to separate the truth from the lies. They wouldn’t want to hear about wishing you knew the goddamn information they wanted so you could tell them and make the pain stop--tell them so they’d just kill you already. They don’t want to hear that you’d started rationalizing eating your commanding officer--after all, if he was already dead . . . . They’d rather hear about you repeating your name, rank, and serial number until the guard backhands you out of frustration and you spit another mouthful of bloody saliva into his face. Well, that kind of defiance doesn’t last much beyond the first week, if that long. There’s no glamour in being brave in the face of torture, no glory. What it gets you is a whole lot of pain. Then the bravery is gone and your dignity is gone and eventually everything you thought you were is gone.
I doubt sharing that would be much of a reward for the bright-eyed eager kid who might have the courage to ask. Maybe I’ll say that what’s important is that we came home. Though that’s not always the most important thing--and this damned kid, this damned hypothetical kid would probably be brash enough to point that out.
I’ll just leave them to their naïve speculation and awe on this one. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of them pinpoint this particular event in my life. True, I wasn’t a captain then, wasn’t even command track yet, but surviving torture--Cardassian torture--and emerging with your wits intact enough to continue your scientific career and then go on to become a captain . . . . Well, I can see why they might like to make a point of that one. Like I said, there’s a measure of the right stuff one simply has to have inside.
Maybe they get into even more psychoanalysis and suggest the mission where I lost my father and fiancé. It was after that mission that I entered the command track. I wonder what connections they make, what conclusions they draw from that. Oh, the irony of that scenario! That my inability to make the call--to simply save one of them, my father or Justin--would be the launching point for my command career, a path marked most distinctly by the responsibility of always having to make the decision.
Of course, the truth is that I believed I could save them both. Despite what the instruments were telling me, I believed I could find enough power, route it to the transporter in that seemingly mystical way engineers have, and pull off a miracle of my own. That was the first time I really tried to do the impossible. I wonder if they note that, if they see how truly interesting it is, that the first time I set out to achieve the impossible I failed miserably, lost two of the most important people in my life--if my life were a Greek tragedy, it would have been appropriate punishment for my hubris. But I never believed in gods. What I believed in was science and Starfleet and myself. I don’t think about this much--I certainly don’t talk about it. But if it came down to brass tacks, I’d have to admit that what I did was set out to prove that my faith was justified. My faith in science and Starfleet, yes, but mostly my faith in myself. If I could command, if I could be a captain, then not only would my competency be proven, so too would my judgment be proven--practically stamped and sealed, Starfleet-certified.
And I got that seal. All those things they remember and pull out when they talk about me, the successes they catalog to prove why I’m great, the things that subconsciously make up a mental list entitled Impossible Things the Legend Kathryn Janeway Accomplished--well, how perfectly delicious that the one that should head the list was an utter failure. Hell, maybe someday I’d better write my own damn book so all those people with their theories can get one thing straight. Sometimes the impossible really is.
A very important person once said that we humans use that word impossible far too often. I suppose that’s true. But I think if she’d known me better at the time, she wouldn’t have said it. Chakotay would have told her that saying that to me is coming way too close to a dare. Hmph. She probably would have said it anyway. She always did like to challenge me, in as many ways as possible.
The trick is knowing when risking the impossible is worth it. Yeah, write that down if you want. A little pearl of wisdom from the great captain. Just remember that the only difference between bravery and stupidity is the result. If you pull it off, it’s brave, and if you do it three times or fifty times, you’re on your way to being a legend. But what does it take to pull it off? To save a desperate action from stupidity and elevate it to brilliant insight and bravery? Well, it’s not luck. If you’re going to try something impossible, you better damn well have something other than luck going for you. I never believed in luck, either, except the kind you make for yourself.
So what was the moment that made me a captain? Oh, I was always a captain, really. It’s just something in you, something a little cocky, a little insane. It’s having a little less regard for your own life than most people have and a little more regard for things bigger than yourself. It’s a strange faith in yourself and your own ability and judgment. It’s a belief that no matter what happens, you can probably survive--and pull others through with you. A little cocky, a little insane.
But the moment that made me as a captain, the moment that could have broken me? You never know it when you’re living it, I know that for sure. There’s rarely time in that moment. See, captains talk too. We remember how we felt about the legends and our own COs when we were younger, inexperienced. We remember how we speculated. We didn’t have to become captains before we had enough experience to realize that in all those situations we rehashed, all those amazing moments of survival and success, the people involved surely never thought to themselves, This is it. The moment when I fail or succeed as a commander. This is the test. If you have a moment that breaks you, you know it once it’s happened. Maybe immediately, in the seconds before you’re killed or you ship is taken. Definitely, in the aftermath, if you survive. But recognizing the moment of inauguration?
There are moments in the thick of things, certainly, when you think to yourself, God, this is it, this is when I have to step up to the plate and do it right. But the moment? There’s always another moment. Another attack, another spatial anomaly, another systems failure, another away mission gone bad. You always wonder, even after facing hundreds of those tests, is the next one it? Will the next one break me, reveal that I’m not worthy of this great responsibility?
Paradoxically, a captain also reaches a point where she knows she’s a good commander. She never, if she’s smart--and Starfleet captains are smart--forgets that there’s going to be another trial, another chance for her to fail catastrophically. We live with the fact that any moment could bring with it a decision that could prove tragic--even catastrophic. A single lost life is tragic. The loss of your crew, your ship, a sister ship, a planet--that’s catastrophic for a captain. And such a moment could come any minute, but sometimes a captain lives through many such catastrophes without being broken. Sometimes, these things happen no matter how worthy you are. And even knowing you’re a good captain, you’re always aware of the weight of making the call, of holding the responsibility, and of the potential consequences of your decisions. We fail, even good captains. Those aren’t the moments that make or break captains. The things that make or break captains, the ones that reveal whether or not she’s worth her pips, can be terribly small in the scheme of things.
I was made when my ship was wrenched 70,000 light years into unknown space and I found myself sprawled in the ruins of my shiny new bridge, my officers dead around me. I got up. I got on with it. I knew I couldn’t give myself time for those very human things: confusion, shock, horror, grief. They were all there, heavy and sharp, but the weight of command was there, too, and it was what I used to balance myself. Our language implies that the weight of command is a burden. What we don’t usually say, what outsiders don’t realize, is that it can also be an anchor keeping us steady during a crisis. It can be a force, pushing us beyond our usual limitations. We are reborn in those moments. Reborn as something other, as something less human, more . . . .
Well. This is why we don’t often talk about this aspect of command, not even to each other. But we don’t have to speak of it--we can see it in each other’s eyes, whether we be comrades or enemies. I can hear it in my own voice at times--an implacability, a nonchalance, a coldness--when living beings become resources to be deployed effectively and human feelings become a liability I can’t afford, in myself or in others. The effects are cumulative, I believe. Most of us aren’t changed too much by it. Most captains aren’t forced into situations where they’re required to make the transition frequently over a long period as I was.
It became easier to step out of myself, but harder to step back in, back down, after the crisis had passed. It became harder to do the human things. Harder to relax, harder to just have fun, to laugh or joke, to expect kindness from strangers, harder to cry. It became easier to bear absolute authority, easier to the be the figurehead, the symbol, easier to keep my balance on that pedestal. Easier still after those in whom I might have confided, from whom I had silently drawn support, were gone. Easier to slip the bonds of humanity when those human bonds of friendship and fraternity are dissolved, when nothing is holding you down any longer, and so much easier to dissolve all the rest once the strongest ties are severed.
I was made as a captain in the Delta Quadrant, reborn, baptized and consecrated to that fourth pip. The elevation itself took a little longer. I got up and got on with it many times, and it got easier each time, until it was effortless, until, finally, I was beyond so many petty concerns. Those last twelve years, it was all so very easy. But it was impossible to come back down, I admit--and impossible is a word I learned long ago to use only advisedly. Someone else will have to write that book, though. I couldn’t come down, but now, at last, I can go back.
I never believed in a single future written in stone. Yet some futures have been lost, precluded by past choices, past actions. The past really is the future, but the past is not immutable. Destiny? Fate? I’m making the call. I was born with the nature of a starship captain. A little cocky, a little insane. I never had much use for the impossible, always took it as a dare. It has taken too much from me, over the years. I’ve given up more of myself than I could recover. But more important things were lost, things I can recover now, and it’s never been easier to get up and get on with it. I’m still the captain, despite the pips on my breast. I know I can bring the others safely through, and an old woman who’s become too much to be human is not a resource I mind expending.