Where You Put Your Spine

Posted on Fri Sep 5th, 2025 @ 11:34pm by Commodore Stephen MacCaffery

4,128 words; about a 21 minute read

Mission: Second Light
Location: Starfleet Academy Annex
Timeline: 242509.05

He arrived early. He always did, and the room rewarded him for it.

The amphitheater was still, curved seating tumbling down toward his lectern like a quiet wave. The holoprojectors along the walls slept with their eyes open, soft blue rings breathing in and out. Stephen set his old leather briefcase on the front corner of the desk and took the same three steps he took every time: place the steaming Earl Grey at the rear left where his sleeve would not catch it; set his PADD of notes on the charging strip; lay the stylus across it at a diagonal; and, finally, lift the small frame from the briefcase and set it at the right edge, angled toward him. The image, Sidra with wind in her hair, Will mid-laugh, the Scottish coast beyond them, caught the room’s early light and made a thin ribbon of reflection across the glass. He let his thumb tap the frame once. A private reset.

Methodical things had power. He believed that the way some men believed in luck.

He checked the room’s temperature and humidity with a glance at the control panel and shifted both a fraction warmer. Voices carried better in a room that didn’t make people brace. He looked up into the seating and imagined where the students would be, the rows filling with bodies and holograms alike. The logs showed twenty-three remote today, five in-person, most of the remotes were full-scale holo captures, uniform fidelity set high enough that he would see the shift of a jaw muscle when they argued. He liked that. Faces told him what the law did not.

His thumb found the stylus. Double-tap, habit before a turn. He cleared his throat once, not because he needed to but because it marked the line between private and public.

“Class link active,” the room told him in a soft contralto. “Secure lattice confirmed. Attendee sync in ten… nine…”

They came in with the soft compression of the system breathing them into place. First a flicker of light, then weight: a row of cadets in red-collared uniforms across the middle tier, a blue-uniformed lieutenant with a halo of Andorian white hair taking an aisle seat two rows up, a Tellarite legal clerk settling himself down with a harrumph that translated through the buffer as a low thud. Remote silhouettes sharpened. One image wavered, latency pinging from a mining colony relay, then snapped into fidelity as the system found a cleaner path. On the front row to his right, two real bodies dropped bags at their feet and took their seats: a gold-collared chief petty officer with the look of a man who had learned to read orders while standing, and a commander in science blue whose pips sat straight no matter where she moved.

The rest of the seats filled: Vulcan calm up top, Bajoran brow ridges catching the light, human faces in all the tones of Earth and half a dozen colonies. In his head, Stephen placed them by habit: quiet ones to watch, talkers to shape, doubters to leave room for. He checked the time—the minute ticked clean, and looked up into the middle of the room so everyone felt seen.

“Good evening.” He let the words settle. “Today we return to a case almost no one remembers until it is too late to wish they had: the Valley Forge Inquiry and the companion court-martial Starfleet v. Vanderwal.”

He touched his stylus to the PADD, and the room bent. Holographic projectors seeded air with a ghost of a different place, light dimmed a shade, soundproofing adjusted its texture, and a bridge bloomed into being around them in pale, translucent lines to start. The seats stayed where they were, but around the lectern a horseshoe of consoles resolved, the captain’s chair a ghost, the viewscreen a dark mirror. Names tagged objects in discreet text at the lower corners: USS Valley Forge , Lantaru Sector, Stardate 51486.3.

Stephen hated theater when it served itself. He loved it when it served attention. He kept the fidelity low for the first pass; there was time to turn the color on later.

“Fifty years ago,” he said, voice even. “Dominion War endgame. The Lantaru Corridor saw its share of smoke, misdirection, and men with too much to prove. The Valley Forge ’s task force received a priority signal: a convoy flagged as compromised, possible Jem’Hadar boarding, transponder anomalies, comms dark. Task Force Command issued a fire-clear signal on tight time. The Valley Forge complied. A civilian freighter died with six hundred aboard.”

A rustle. A face up in the god, the Vulcan, didn’t move, but her hand stilled on her stylus. He saw it. Good.

“The Inquiry found fault in the signal path, in the tempo, and in the rules that let one man with a big hat press a button that made lesser hats shoot. But that is not why we are here. We are here because a junior officer, Lieutenant j.g. Arliss Vanderwal, locked out his phaser bank and refused to fire.”

He let the word refused hang in the room until the edges stopped humming.

“Insubordination.” The gold-collared chief in the front row said it like a test.

“Charged,” Stephen said. “Tried. Almost broken by it. And in the end, the court did something our law rarely does at speed: it changed.”

He walked two steps and brought the fidelity up a notch with a finger-slide. The bridge’s consoles deepened to near-solid. Audio came alive, the low functional heartbeat of a ship in pressure: chirps, clicks, the soft thrum of something with mass and will. He didn’t need to act; the room would do the work.

“Let’s watch.”

He tapped the stylus again and a reenactment bloomed in the well of the room: a composite built from the ship’s own logs, matched to the Inquiry’s interviews, time-coded and stitched into a single flow. He had checked the composite himself, filtered out the dramatization tendencies that too many holos liked. What showed was clean: the tight chatter of a bridge, the captain’s voice calm, the tactical officer’s hands sure, the sensor readouts flickering with a compression artifact someone in the last sixty seconds should have noticed and did not.

Over by tactical, a young man’s hand hovered a heartbeat too long and then moved to a side panel. He keyed in a lock-out command. He did it with bad sleight-of-hand and good intentions, and every person in the room who had ever served saw both.

“Freeze,” Stephen said. The room obeyed. He stepped into the ghost of the bridge and stood where the young man had stood. “We will come back to whether his method was wise. First, I want you to tell me what he was supposed to do.”

“Follow orders,” a remote in red said. Human, sharp jaw, eyes already lined with argument.

“Until what point?” Stephen asked. He kept his tone curious. He knew what he believed and bent away from it; the room didn’t need his belief yet. “Cadet Tural?”

Up in the back, the Vulcan looked down. “An order is presumed lawful if issued by a superior within his competence and not overtly violative of law,” she said. “The presumption ends when the unlawfulness is manifest.”

“Define manifest,” Stephen said.

The Andorian lieutenant on the aisle, real, present, leaned forward. “Obvious. To a reasonable officer with the facts in hand. Not everything is a puzzle and not every puzzle gives you time.”

“Good,” Stephen said. “And do we think Vanderwal had the facts in hand?”

Silence, thinking, the kind he liked.

The Bajoran on the mid-tier, remote, but so faithful a capture that Stephen saw the fine line where her earring would be if she weren’t in uniform, raised two fingers.

“The compression artifact,” she said. “Sensor drift. Enough to trigger a re-verify protocol under Provision Twelve.”

“And how long does that take?” Stephen asked.

“A minute,” the chief in the front said. “Too long if you think a raider is spooling up to jump.”

“Which is why the case mattered,” Stephen said. He let his stylus double-tap once against his PADD before the turn. “Vanderwal said ‘no’ for a minute. His ‘no’ saved a life and almost cost him his own career.”

He slid the fidelity higher.

The room took a breath and the bridge turned fully real. The reenactment ran again, this time no longer a ghost but a room full of people who would act whether or not you approved. The captain called the shot. The lock-out beeped denial. Heads turned. The reenacted Vanderwal looked, for a second, exactly like a man who had chosen the wrong hill. Then came a second signal on a different channel: the convoy leader’s voice cracked alive, choked, but alive. There was no boarding. There was a relay outage and a transponder signature someone had spoofed. The freighter lived by thirty seconds and one junior’s refusal.

Stephen killed the simulation with a flick and let the classroom be a classroom again. He didn’t linger on the drama. He turned to the law.

“Let’s walk the holdings,” he said. “What did the Valley Forge Inquiry change at the governance level?”

A Tellarite snort that came from three rows down and six sectors away even through the lattice. “It took the fire-clear out of one man’s hands,” he said. “Made it two independent verifications for any civilian target, and one of those had to be local.”

“Yes,” Stephen said. “The Council adopted dual-source verification and put civilian oversight on the task-force protocols. Less speed, more eyes.”

“And for us,” the Andorian said. “The Vanderwal Standard.”

Stephen nodded. “Say it.”

The Andorian looked like a man reciting a catechism he’d decided to believe. “An officer has a duty to refuse a manifestly unlawful order, where manifest means obvious to a reasonable officer with the facts in hand, and he has a duty to seek those facts up to the point where delay creates unreasonable risk.”

“Short form,” Stephen said. “Duty to dissent and duty to check, bounded by duty to protect.” He paused. “The dissent saved six hundred. The check saved the officer from being wrong.”

He watched the room breathe. On his PADD, he pulled up the majority opinion and let it float above the lectern. Black text on translucent pane, nothing fancy. He hated fancy.

“Read it,” he said. “Look where they do their real work. See what words they chose. ‘Reasonable officer.’ ‘Facts in hand.’ ‘Unreasonable risk.’ These words feel modest. They are not. They are the place where we ask you to put your spine.”

On the third row, the commander in science blue shifted in her chair. “Sir,” she said. “Where did the Court land on the lock-out? On the means?”

Stephen had known we would get there and had a clean answer ready. “They allowed it,” he said. “But they did not bless it. They called it a bad method used for a good purpose. They said had the shot gone out and hit a raider, Vanderwal would still be guilty of insubordination and poor seamanship. Means matter. If you have to dissent, do it clean. Call it, state it, eat the consequences.”

He let the silence sit. He wanted it to be uncomfortable. The room needed to feel the thing under the doctrine: here be cost.

Up on the mid-tier, Cadet Tural lifted a hand. “Professor,” she said, “may I ask, does the case say anything about command influence? The captain was seconds from firing. The task force had already signaled. How do we expect juniors to dissent in a room like that without… without being crushed?”

Stephen felt something in him tug toward the thing he did not say in classrooms: you grow the courage before you need it, or you do not have it when it would do any good. He pushed the thought back down and kept to the craft.

“The case gave us the firewall,” he said. “The Valley Forge holdings codified that when a dissent is made in good faith, a superior cannot poison the process with their rank later. The Court required all insubordination charges that touch a dissent to be screened outside the unit and, if possible, outside the chain. You do not get to write the charges on a man who embarrassed you and then try him before your friends.”

The chief petty officer made a sound that was not quite a laugh. “We still try,” he said.

“We do,” Stephen said. “Which is why we learn this one. It is obscure because the world would rather forget its humiliations. Your job is to remember them.”

He slid through the opinion’s text and, with the stylus, highlighted a paragraph he loved. He never said love out loud about court opinions. He let his finger linger a second longer than he needed to.

“The Court spoke to a thing we don’t say enough: dissent is not a virtue. It is a duty when it is owed, and an indulgence when it is not.” He looked up. “That line has saved more careers than the holding.”

A hand flickered in and out up top, the mining colony relay fighting a dust storm or a cheap antenna. The student’s image glitched and recovered in a heartbeat. The room compensated—the system smoothed a breath. Stephen leaned into the lectern a shade so the student would see he had waited. The student gave a small nod of thanks no one else would notice.

“Sir,” he said. “What about now? We’re not in the Dominion War. Half of our ‘convoys’ are privateers with letters of marque and a VC funding model. Does Valley Forge still reach them?”

“Yes,” Stephen said, and he let the flat word do the work. “Because law built for kinetic fights tends to misfire hardest in gray zones. Provision Twelve got a sibling after this case, Provision Twelve-B, precisely for privateer encounters. Dual-source verification. Local voice. Independent sensor cross-checks when possible. If you can’t get them, then you must label your fire-clear as provisional and keep the throttle ready to pull back. The duty to check survives in gray water.”

He caught his own reflection in the frame at the desk’s edge and did not look twice. He kept the class moving.

He called up witness testimony next, translated from a Rigelian accent into standard, the voice of a convoy captain who had been sure he was about to die: “We were dark. Navigation had burned out a relay. We thought the fleet was ignoring us. Then… then nothing happened. Thirty seconds of nothing. It saved us.” The voice cut into the room and made it small. Two students up top looked down at their hands and didn’t pretend it was dust.

Stephen had crafted these pulls carefully. He used as few as possible. He never turned a class into a stage, but he let the right words soak a room.

“Let’s argue the other way,” he said when the testimony faded. “Your Task Force Command. You own the sky. You have numbers. You have a pulse. Convoy goes dark in a corridor with a history that would curdle milk. You call a fire-clear and a junior shuts down his guns. How do you not lose your mind?”

The red-collared cadet found his voice again. “He took the ship,” he said. “If everyone does that you have a mutiny.”

“Which is why this is hard,” Stephen said. “We do not get one virtue at a time. We hold three and pray our hands are big enough.”

He ran a controlled reenactment of the task force op center, less theater, more numinous light tracing comm flows across a sector map. He let the class see what Command had seen: a pattern that looked like a shape until it did not. He held them there long enough for the patterns to wobble.

“You get this picture,” he said, “and you’re tired and ten minutes behind an enemy that kills joy for sport. ‘Manifest unlawfulness’ feels like a joke until you kill the wrong six hundred.”

He double-tapped the stylus again. The turn.

“Which is why the Court put a ‘duty to check’ next to the ‘duty to dissent.’ You do not get to sit on your hands and hope to be rescued by a miracle of timing. Vanderwal took a second source. He didn’t roll dice; he picked up another coin.”

He let the simulation fall away. The room, back to being itself, felt a shade colder. He touched the climate pad with a knuckle, bringing the air back up to where voices didn’t shiver.

He walked them through the dissent. Showed them the language that said, “No.” He dissected the dissenter’s logic without ever letting his face tell them where he fell. He watched the Andorian’s shoulders, how they rose when he hit a point of friction and dropped when he cut it clean.

He watched the chief petty officer’s hands, how he stopped gripping the arm of his chair only when he had been given a rule he could take back to someone who might need it. He watched the Tellarite’s mouth come open and then politely shut, the first sign in that species of respect.

He never forgot that most of them would not sit where he stood. They would stand where Vanderwal had stood. He taught for that room, not this one.

Halfway through, a student’s holo stalled and threw a mosaic across his face. Stephen paused, eyes lifting above the lectern far enough that the system’s camera would see it and compensate. The lattice rerouted and, a beat later, the image smoothed. The student dipped his chin, embarrassed. Stephen didn’t name it. Technology failed. People failed. Law had been built for that.

He knew the urge to tell them what to feel. He pressed it down and kept the work on the table instead of in their chests.

“Before we close,” he said at last, “I want you to see the dissent in Vanderwal.”

He brought it up—two pages, tight script, the place where a judge old enough to be tired of grand gestures had written: “We must not make martyrs as a habit.” The dissent would have upheld the insubordination charge to protect command lines, trusting policy fixes to catch the next convoy. It had teeth. Stephen showed them where it bit. He wanted his students to feel teeth and not assume they were always wrong when they hurt.

“Now,” he said, “let’s bring it home.”

He had been careful all term not to make this class a sermon with props. He kept that line now. He showed them three current scenarios in stripped detail, no unit names, no gossip. A privateer hire with a partisan sponsor whose letter-of-marque had outpaced its moral claim. A colony militia with a history of shooting first and arguing with funerals. A flag officer who liked to show up where he was not useful and cast shadows over Article 32 hearings with the weight of his shoulders. He asked the room how the Valley Forge and Vanderwal holdings met each.

“They don’t save you,” he said when someone reached for hope like candy. “They teach you what to call what you see, and they tell you who owns the decision. That is enough. Most days.”

He set the stylus down and took a measured sip of his now-cool tea. The taste had gone flat but the ritual still settled his hands.

“Assignments,” he said. “Ensign Padran”, the red-collared cadet looked up, surprised to be chosen, which is why Stephen had chosen him, “you will argue Task Force Command next week. You will defend the fire-clear and you will do it without theater.”

A murmur in the seats, living and holographic both. Padran straightened. Good.

“Cadet Tural,” he said, looking to the Vulcan who had been precise without cruelty all hour, “you will argue for Vanderwal. You will defend his dissent and the lock-out method if you can. If you cannot, you will tell me how he should have done it.”

“Yes, Professor,” she said, no register of relief or fear, which did not mean she did not feel either. Vulcans were not stone; they were people who had learned different tricks.

“Twelve of you”, he slid his finger along the PADD and the system picked twelve names from across species, service branches, and talkers versus quiets, “will constitute the jury. You will read the original record. You will read the Inquiry, majority and dissent. You will keep your own counsel and bring me a verdict with a holding you could apply to the worst captain you have ever served and the best one. Do not write me a love letter to this case. Write me something that can be used.”

He let his gaze walk the room. Remotes met his eyes as surely as the living bodies did. The lattice brought a hundred small human things across the light-years, the twitch where someone wanted to ask and did not, the way another worried the seam of a uniform shoulder when math got hard. Education, in this century or any other, had always been the same: bodies in a room, attending.

“Questions?” he asked. A hand went up, the Tellarite’s this time, and he answered it cleanly and briefly. Another, from the Andorian, asking for clarity on “manifest.” He gave it its edges and not its comfort. He watched them write it down like something they meant to keep.

He dismissed them with a nod and a time. The room exhaled as one: bodies stood, remotes parted the air with their light and then were gone, seats creaked back to neutral. Metal and fabric remembered no one.

Stephen stayed where he was until the last ghost vanished and the blue rings along the walls smoothed to their resting pulse. He closed the opinion panes and flattened the reenactment to a thumbnail that would not flicker on some poor tech’s board later in the night. He set the stylus across the PADD and moved the family photograph back toward the center, studying the glint of light across the glass the way men twice his age studied maps.

Tonight’s session was good. They had circled a hard question long enough to feel the corners on it. No one had quit. He liked them for that.
He slid his hand into the briefcase and came up with the smooth pipe he allowed himself when a session had earned it, a slim thing, synthetic tobacco loaded in a cartridge that would offend no filter and break no rule. He touched it to his lower lip and drew enough to make the air taste like cedar, enough to tell his muscles the hour had changed.

He leaned back against the edge of the desk and let his shoulders drop a notch. In his mind, he walked the room again, placing the twelve jurors in the old tribunal’s well. He heard how Tural would say “manifest” and how Padran would try to make necessity into a blanket and find himself tangled. He felt the friction he wanted next week. He felt the small pride that came when a room had met the thing you brought to it and refused to look away.
He did not kid himself that the case would save any of them. Cases did not save. People did, sometimes, on good days, with clean rules and a will to hold them.

He tapped the frame’s glass with his thumb again, an old habit and a new vow, and let the room dim one notch further. The holoprojectors’ rings softened to a thin glow. He cupped the pipe in his hand and breathed out a ribbon of scent that would be gone in seconds.

He clicked the pipe off, slid the frame into the briefcase with care, and palmed the room dark. He was looking forward to next week already, to the way a jury taught itself, to the way a room full of officers and would-be officers learned to argue without removing each other’s spines.

The door sighed open. He did not look back. He didn’t need to. The room would be there in seven days, contrite and hungry, ready to be filled again.
He stepped out into the corridor and let the station’s artificial curve carry him toward home.

End Log

Commodore Stephen J. Mccaffrey

 

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