Sci looked at the lieutenant, an inscrutable expression on his face.
"You want to... quit..."
Mike looked up at the giant screen, his hands clenched tightly on the back of the chair in front of him. A close observer would notice the whiteness of his knuckles, as much of the recently-injured young man's weight was resting on his hands.
"Yes. I want to resign from Terra Group."
"May I ask why?"
Mike took a deep breath. This was the part he'd been dreading. Ever since waking up in the bacta tank on the Red Home, he'd felt the need to voice the words now nestling on the tip of his tongue.
"I hate it," he said, quietly.
"I'm sorry?" Sci said, reaching out of the frame to adjust what Mike presumed was he volume control.
"I said I hate it," Mike repeated, louder.
"Yes," Sci said, a slightly sad expression passing fleetingly across his features. "That's what I thought you said. Again, though: Why?"
Mike's eyes dropped from the screen, his gaze focussing somewhere other than the here-and-now.
"Death, destruction, torture, loss, fear, secrecy, anguish, hate..." Mike laughed, humourlessly. "In the year and a half since I signed on with Terra Group, I feel like I've aged a lifetime. At least. I'm twenty-one, and my friends are finishing university, they're seeing the world or they're finding jobs. They fight, they shag, they love, they hate... It's normal, and they don't have to worry about some psychotic with a ray-gun, they don't have to worry about their friends jumping into hyperspace on a jerry-rigged shuttle..."
Mike slumped into the chair, and held his hand out in front of him. Even over the staticky holo-link, Sci could see the shaking.
"I'm burnt out. I wasn't meant to fight, on any scale. I go off to Paris, expecting a nice, quiet trip, and there's bombs, rocket launchers, psycho chicks who fight like Noghris... The group was torn apart just by the people in it, let alone when outside forces were acting upon it. It's too much for me to cope with, not to mention that people died because we screwed up over there. More blood on my conscience..."
He looked up at his commanding officer.
"I'm not making much sense, but there it is. I can't cope with being some James-Bond-champagne-from-the-dead-bad-guy's-wine-cellar type. If I go, the Group will be better off. Bring in a cop or someone to replace me...." his voice tailed off as he stared into nothingness again.
Sci looked at the forlorn figure, and pondered his options. Coming down hard on Mike would probably break him, but soft-pedalling the issue could break everyone else. Not for the first time, Sci wondered why he'd been chosen, out of all the seven billion people on the planet, for this job.
"You've thought this through?" he asked, as much to earn some more time as to get the obvious answer.
"For the last week," Mike replied. "Let's face it, my service record isn't exactly spotless. I killed T'Cab and those stormtroopers, and pretty much had a nervous breakdown over it. I'm part of an intergalactic agency bent on protecting this planet, and yet I've taken a vow that I'll never kill again. Sometimes, maybe, we might have to. If I can't do it, what use am I?"
Sci paused, staring thoughtfully at his team-mate. He had worries aplenty to deal with, and now this new one as well. He wondered what was going through Mike's head. Not self-pity, Sci suspected, so much as exhaustion.
He called up Mike's Terra Group service record and ran through it briefly. Citations for his work in destroying Atner's cloning chamber, and for his role in the Admonitor assault were weighed against the history of insubordination, unreliability, practical jokes and what an NR psychiatrist had identified as a high susceptibility to combat stress.
Sci gave up. He was in no position to make a sound decision now. A textbook case on Mike would see him given his honourable discharge, but Sci couldn't help but think of all the examples of legend when a chance was taken, and repaid tenfold. He sighed.
"Will you stay until the end of this mission?" he asked.
"Someone needs to fly the others to wherever they're going," Mike replied.
"Can you be relied upon if they need more than a pilot?" Sci asked. It wasn't a fair question, but he still wanted an answer.
Mike ran his hands through his hair, squeezing his eyes shut as he did so.
"Maybe," he replied, eventually. Sci looked on, impassively.
"Don't go making any sudden decisions," he said, eventually. "I'll want to talk to you when we return, Lieutenant." With that, he reached forward and cut the connection.
Mike sat alone, the ops room now dark without the glow from the screen. For a time, he stared into space, before climbing stiffly to his feet, and leaving the Terra Group ops room in search of his next step.