"Don't think I'm idly threatening you," Jackson said. "I'm no intelligence operative, so I have no illusions about breaking you. But you were allowed into my inner sanctum. You were in a room alone with my children. That's clouding my judgement and making me think you're already far more trouble than you're worth."

"So, why are you down here?"

"I don't like to give in to the baser instincts," Jackson said. "I was hoping talking to you again would convince me to not do something needlessly brutal, but I'd say I'm still undecided. Where are you from? Really from, that is. I know your service records are forged by someone with some skill." Trapp just blinked at the sudden turn in the conversation.

"It's not important," she said. "It's certainly not something that would convince you to spare my life, so why bother talking about it?"

"General curiosity at this point," Jackson said. "This might have been all in a day's work for you, but for a person like me, the betrayal stings and needs to be explained."

"That's why you were chosen to command starships and I was chosen to be an operative. These are mutually exclusive skill sets. That means we have no points of commonality, Admiral. With no overlap in our psychological makeup, there's no common ground for us to stand on. I've read your profile. The despised Earther who, despite an outward appearance of indifference, still desperately wanted to be accepted and loved. So much so he developed a semi-serious drinking problem in a day and age where that's fairly uncommon."

Jackson let her think she'd gained the upper hand by dragging up his old demons, interested in observing her on the offensive. The truth was that she wasn't wrong, but she also wasn't current. He hadn't cared about the things she spoke of since he drove the Blue Jacket into a wounded Phage scout. Surviving that had been a major turning point in his life and the start of his road to redemption in both his own eyes and those of his peers who thought he was just a useless drunk, marking time until retirement.

He realized his antisocial behavior had been a defensive mechanism more than anything. He didn't actually enjoy being drunk, but he learned to enjoy the discomfort of others at his behavior. It didn't matter if they didn't like him if he was the one who gave them the reason to hate him in the first place. The self-destructive dance seemed so childish to his eyes as he looked back on his life, but it was something he had to go through to get where he was now.

"And you have no insecurities? No regrets? Nobody who will care if you get spaced or not?" he asked.

"Family life isn't what this job is about," she laughed humorlessly. "I was always going to die from unnatural causes. The fact you're not even going to bother torturing me first makes this almost relaxing. This mission was getting too many loose ends to it."