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"Dead Stop"
Rating: PG
She found him half into a Jeffries tube that had been a crushed wreck just hours before. It gave her an excellent view of the engineer's well-developed gluteus maximus -- not that such irrelevant details ought to command any of her attention. Perhaps that was why her voice came out a little more harshly than she intended when she said, "Commander Tucker!" There was a loud thump and a muttered curse. She really must try to remember not to startle the man when he was in close confines. He was already far too prone to injury. "The captain wants your opinion of the quality of the repairs being performed," she said, more softly this time. He backed out of the tube and straightened into something approaching attention, though he was also rubbing the side of his head. "The work is flawless. I can't find the slightest variance or defect." "The captain will be pleased." Tucker gave her a skeptical look. T'Pol said, "You don't believe he welcome such a report?" "All I know is, it's kinda freaky when an anonymous machine can do in minutes what a crew of Humans would take days to complete, and do it better. If you watch a lot of movies, you know it never bodes well. It's like... I don't know ... science fiction plot B2, or something." T'Pol tilted her head, puzzled. "Enterprise's computer completes many routine and labor-intensive tasks much faster than Humans could, but you don't appear to consider it 'creepy'." "No, but if I'd traveled through time from two hundred or three hundred years ago, I probably would." He sighed. "We're just not used to this level of expertise from a machine. I also can't help wondering what kind of fleet we could build if we had something like this back home. Which makes me wonder ... why is it so isolated out here? Why isn't the joint hopping with business?" "Perhaps its programming does not encompass building new designs from other civilizations. This area of space is also a great distance from any habitable planets." "Granted, but just having this available as a repair facility ought to be enough to make the place very popular. People ought to be fighting over it." She sometimes forgot that Humans remained quite primitive; it should not have surprised her that the engineer would immediately leap from recognition of a valuable resource to thoughts of strategic competition and even violence. It would be interesting to see if the captain shared Tucker's point of view. "Your literary and political concerns aside, I can report to the captain that you feel the repairs are sound?" "Yes, absolutely. Good thing, too. Guess we really shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, huh?" Gift horse in the mouth? She would have to look that one up. She would have asked, but the captain was waiting for his report. Besides, it was her experience that Commander Tucker's explanations for his colorful figures of speech were only correct about half the time. She was not sure if this was because he did not, in fact, know the etymology of such phrases, or because he so enjoyed -- and this was a figure of speech she had learned early in their voyage -- pulling her leg.
Tucker was running his scanner over the damaged EPS grid in a markedly half-hearted way. All the Humans had been struck with grief and anger at the loss of their helmsman, which was understandable. Indeed, it appeared the captain had decided to completely disregard Reed and Tucker's dangerous behavior on the repair station, though it was possible he had merely decided to delay their punishment. "Have you found anything?" she asked, trying to prompt him back to his usual degree of fierce attention to such matters. Tucker just shook his head impatiently. "I already scanned it twice. I'm not going to find anything." "Then..." "I have to do something," he said. "Besides," he added grimly, "It appears we'll be repairing this panel ourselves, so I might as well figure out what needs doing." He stopped scanning and turned to her. "It doesn't make any sense, T'Pol. Even if Travis somehow caused this damage by being here at the wrong time, why would the station leave it in this condition?" "Perhaps it concluded that we would wish to retrieve the body." Tucker's face darkened. "Mighty accommodatin' of it. If it knew that much, then why didn't it just stop when Travis came in here?" "I don't know." Tucker's voice rose and he began to gesticulate. "And why the hell would Travis come in here? He's not like me or Malcolm. I've never even seen him try to bend a rule." "The behavior does seem most uncharacteristic." "Maybe this is why nobody's fighting over this place." She stared at him a moment, trying to follow his logic. "Are you suggesting the station deliberately committed murder?" "It makes more sense than Travis coming into a restricted area when he's off-duty and accidentally frying himself." "Perhaps your fondness for science fiction movies is affecting your judgment in this matter. I cannot imagine what possible motivation the station would have to kill one of our crewmen - especially since it did not harm to you or Mr. Reed despite your intrusion into restricted areas." Tucker grimaced. "I know, I know. But look...what if it's a way to keep people from visiting too often? Because this place looks like a real bargain, unless, say... you discover you're going to have give up a crewman's life every time you stop by." "There are some cultures that would happily trade someone's life for such services." "Well, maybe those cultures get offered a different payment structure. Or maybe it's the fact that you don't know who's going to be the one... that could definitely make even the meanest sons of bitches think twice... because it could be them. It'd be like playing Russian roulette." "Russian roulette?" He opened his mouth for a moment, then shut it. He said, "I don't think there's any way I can explain that to a Vulcan. You already think we're nuts. But even Humans think it's nuts." She waited, but he still didn't explain. It would be something else for her to look up, then. She said, "The problem with your theory is that if the station did not wish to be visited again, it could simply say so. Or, more basically, it could simply refuse to make any further repairs." He looked at her for a moment. "You're right. But that still leaves us with the fact that this makes no sense." "Then perhaps we should keep looking for an explanation," she said mildly, and returned to her own scans. Tucker returned to his scans with a scowl. It was clear he wasn't satisfied. In truth, she was not satisfied either. Travis Mayweather's death rankled; quite beyond any sense of personal loss that she might have already carefully put away for dispassionate consideration later, his death was an affront against order. Commander Tucker was correct. It made no sense. However much they might differ, it appeared that expecting the universe to make sense was something Humans and Vulcans had in common. Next installment: A Night in Sickbay. |
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