"Wake-Up Call"
Here's a new story from Star Trek: Liberty author Joseph Manno featuring Liberty's Luciano Mantovanni and Dark Horizon's Jack McCall...

          Star Trek: Dark Horizon is simultaneously old school and cutting edge … at once broader in scope and more intimate in focus than your run-of-the-mill fan fiction. Its creator and primary author, Michael Gray, is an old friend/foe of mine. We’ve crossed swords on matters personal (he’s a cynical atheist, I an opinionated Roman Catholic), creative (he’s always there with a compliment, while I’d just as soon cut your work to pieces), and even trivial (how can you use King Ghidorah as an avatar? That’s just wrong).
          But I wager neither of us would have it any other way. This one’s for Michael, the hardest-working man in fan-fic.


“Wake-Up Call”

By Joseph Manno

          Once again, Luciano Mantovanni battled a foe he’d never been able to defeat—one against which even he could barely hold his own.
          Paper’s essentially an artifact of the past, he thought, but … paperwork and paper cuts (metaphorically speaking) are unfortunately still goin’ strong.
          And right about now, I feel sliced to shreds.
          When his ready room’s comm panel chimed, thus, Mantovanni took it as not interruption, but reprieve.
          Or at least temporary stay. He tapped the receive button, and the screen lit to the not-at-all-unpleasant image of his security chief.
          “Commander Rhodes on the bridge, sir. I have a Captain Jack McCall of the USS Chamberlain on a priority channel and scrambled. He asked to speak with you.” She flashed him a lopsided grin. “Said that ‘whatever he’s playing with in his ready room can’t be that important.’”
          Said grin acquired a bit more spice.
          “Kyrie eleison, he’s cute.”
          Mantovanni arched a brow.
          “Oh, I always thought he was just darling, too. Wipe the drool off your console and put him through, will you?”
          “Aye, sir. We’re scrambled on this side, now, too.”
          “Thanks, Cassie.”
          McCall’s charming, acquisitive smile faded the instant he realized that the person looking back wasn’t nearly so pretty.
          “Cicero.”
          After but a moment’s examination of McCall’s new expression, Mantovanni’s darkened.
          “OK. Let’s dispense with the ‘catching up’ pleasantries; you’re clearly not in the mood. What’s up, Jack?”
          And, over the next three minutes, McCall told him.
          “Give me a moment, here. I’m in the process of trying to wrap my admittedly limited imagination around this concept: Jack McCall has a confidence problem. Well, I’m going to assume this isn’t an elaborate practical joke and proceed.”
          Though at this point, Mantovanni thought, I’ve little idea how. This is up there with Sera deciding she’s stupid or Parihn questioning her sex appeal.
          For an instant, while formulating his strategy, he fell back on an old standard—an evaluative play for time.
          “Hey ... just pretend you're looking to get into some woman’s panties. That'll give you all the confidence you need.” Cass sure didn’t seem to mind. “How many of the ones from that class I taught did you go through?”
          “More than my share.”
          “And from what Hajar told me a few years later, you were never much for sharing. Then, again, I’m fairly sure those Argellian twins shared you pretty selflessly, so …”
          Time was, Mantovanni knew, that Jack would have grinned and responded with a witticism about their impeccable taste. Now he looked like he was on the verge of a soliloquy about not having ‘respected’ them.
          Jesus, Mary and Joseph. This is worse than I thought.

          Well, no turning back now, Jack thought.
          Mantovanni’s response to his confession proved less condemnatory than he would have imagined … or, in some masochistic sense, probably hoped.
          "Let’s assume, Jack, that what you’re telling me is true—that you didn’t really earn the rank and privilege you’re now wearing so uncomfortably. I have two words for you: So what?”
          “Huh?”
          “Did I stutter? Even if you weren’t before, which frankly I question, I’m fairly certain you're your own man now, and that's what matters. Just go be the man we all know you can be. Frankly, you're not that good an actor, so there must have been something of pretty high quality in there all this time."
          Jack shook his head. Luciano Mantovanni was one of those men who could make you want to thank him and punch him in the face all at once.
          Of course, the latter would just get me my ass kicked, so …
          Another sobering thought occurred.
          “That course you taught. Did I earn my way in, or did dear old Dad nudge you into including me?”
          Mantovanni snorted.
          “I’ll answer your question with one of my own: Do you think even your father could have muscled me? With all due respect to the old man’s memory … tougher, higher-ranked birds have tried. You would never have gotten into that class if I hadn't wanted you there. Of course, you might have done a little better if you’d been more concerned with tactical options than … ahem … docking maneuvers. You gave new meaning to the phrase, ‘Any port in a storm.’”
          McCall reddened a bit.
          “I’m not sure you’re taking this seriously.”
          Mantovanni arched a brow.
          “When you say something that merits serious consideration, I’ll do so. Just now, I wish I was there with you …
          “… so I could smack you on the back of the head for this kind of stupidity.”
          Well, Jack thought, you don’t come to Luciano Mantovanni for gentle persuasion, after all.
          “What did Richard Needham say? ‘People who are brutally honest enjoy the brutality more than they do the honesty’?”
          Mantovanni arched a brow and offered the slightest smile. "Says the masochist who called me."
          Jack grinned back, and provided a gesture that would likely have gotten him in front of a review board with any other flag officer. With Luciano Mantovanni, it earned him a bigger smile.
          “Now that's a bit of Jack McCall.”
          That bit disappeared only a few seconds later.
          "Look, Cicero, I'm ... I'm reconsidering my choice to come back to Starfleet."

          Briefly, Mantovanni wondered if his poker face had held up to that little revelation.
          "I've got two questions for you: One, what else do you want to do? Answer: Nothing. Two, for you, what else is there to do? Answer?"
          "I've still got my ranch in Nebraska."
          “And I my estates in Sicilia. Nice places to visit, Jack, or retire to. But as a cowboy and vintner, respectively, we make great starship captains."
          “Well, thanks for the ‘we,’ but … this, all the life and death decisions. These aren't hypothetical characters in some abstract Academy dilemma. They're people I know. People I care about."
          “Seems to me, then, that you have two options: You can rely on other people who don’t care about your shipmates and friends because they’re too busy enjoying their power to make galaxy-shaking decisions that affect them … or you can do it yourself."
          “There's a part of me that's tired of having responsibility for other people's destinies."
          "I'll let you in on a little secret: We're most of us tired of it. You don't do it because you enjoy the power. You do it because if you didn't do it, somebody else who did enjoy the power would ... and then where would we be? Either serving in a Starfleet where the Robert Leytons and March Pattersons called all the shots … or, perhaps in your case, avoiding said service. No, thanks."
          "So little reluctant me is all that's keeping us from a dicatorship?" Jack asked with a smirk.
          "Let’s just say you’re holding down your section of the wall and leave it at that."
          "But there are times I look into my officers' eyes and I can see them begging me for answers I don't think anyone has."
          Mantovanni nodded.
          "I can’t help you as much with that, since I believe there’s a Someone who has all the answers.
          “Let me put it this way, instead: Sometimes we have no answers ... at least until someone comes up with one. Sometimes we simply can’t find them. In those cases, all we have instead are our best responses—correct or not, successful or not. Those come from being the best we can be, from the best angels of our natures, from the inspiration of the best people around us.
          “You’re not an island. You’re not going it alone. Let the people you’re so concerned about play the role they’re meant to play: Inspiring you … helping you to be the man you’re not certain you are, but they are certain you are. You’ll be amazed at how allowing them in to do that makes you not only everything you thought you could be, but far more.”
          Something in Jack McCall’s face changed, then—as if the burden had between one heartbeat and another been lightened.
          Mantovanni noted it with a certain relief.
          "Good. Welcome back to the center seat.”
          “Cicero, I don’t know how to th—"
          And before we get too maudlin …
          “Just get out of my face. I have so much paperwork to do the pile has its own damned gravity well." He leaned towards the comm panel switch, and then withheld for a moment.
          “But do me two favors.”
          Jack gestured for him to keep talking.
          “Anything.”
          “One, don’t worry anymore about how you got where you are. Just plot the best course from there, and go to warp.”
          Jack nodded.
          “I’ll give that a try.”
          “Good. Two …
          “… stop flirting with my officers. I got enough of, ‘Ooh, he’s so cute’ when I was teaching you. I don’t want to have to listen to it when you’re light years away.”
          Only then, at long last, did Jack McCall’s smile return in full measure—that particular ‘smirk jerk’ expression that Mantovanni hadn’t much missed, but acknowledged in McCall’s case as a necessary evil.
          “No promises.”
          For the most part, Mantovanni hid his own.
          “Some people … no gratitude.
          “See you out there, Jack.”