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I realized I was cornered.
“Are you Federation Police?” I asked.
“Worse,” the smartly-dressed, wiry man replied. “I’m a Federation lawyer.”
————
Sibby’s Gateway was the planet where, decades before, I had been forced to kill my own mother and brother. The same large office, high in a tower…now filled with storage boxes and covered in dust.
Staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows, the lawyer said, “She must have been quite paranoid. This building is surrounded by acres of nothing. After you killed her, the family business stumbled along, zombified. When it stopped paying bills, everyone just disappeared.”
“And because fate loves a good joke,” I said, “I inherited it all. If she had left me alone and not tried to kill me—her only daughter—she would still be sitting here at this desk, collecting the fruits of her crime.”
“Just so,” the lawyer agreed. “I gathered together here all the stuff I thought you might want to look through…”
————
Sifting through the boxes, I began to cry.
“I…thought you guys didn’t cry.” He offered me a handkerchief.
“I’m Romulan,” I sniffled. “Not Vulcan.”
“I know.”
I gestured at all the clutter of memory: the photos, the books, the data sticks, the gaudy stolen artifacts and trophies of my degenerate mother.
“She had this whole full life,” I said. “Why did she begrudge me mine?”
My brother, whose blood had covered my shoes after his death, left behind stacks of diaries, written in a clumsy Romulan hand. He was just becoming an adult when he died. The thoughts inside were thin and childish.
—Raining again. Went with Esco and Meiwald to the pub. Brigga was working today. How could an Orion be so cute?
I flashed back to that day, decades ago, when rain mixed with blood, a sea of green blood, all that I could see around me.
I turned my back.
“All this stuff, I don’t want any of this. Too much weight.”
The lawyer, whose name was Bixby, then recited, “Our lives are frittered away in details. Simplify, simplify.”
“What?”
“Walden, Thoreau,” he explained. Then he shrugged. “You know, the land would actually be worth more without this old building. It’s not up to code.”
————
Back on the Talon, I signaled Bixby. He responded, “All clear, Ms. T’Lon. I currently read no life-signs in or near the structure.”
“Syron,” I ordered, “Target the structure on the planet with the Talon’s phaser array.”
She gazed intently at her panel. “It’s a clean shot. Are you looking to burn it, explode it, or go all the way?”
“Photonic conversion, I think.”
Soon, the tall, glowing structure had completely sublimated into photons and neutrinos. Only the foundation of the building remained.
Syron then joined me, watching the smoldering remains of the heart of my mother’s mafia empire on the main viewer. She pulled her salt and pepper hair behind her green ears and said, “Maybe you can let go of it now. Move forward.”
“Just being Thoreau,” I smiled.