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“Coitus Conceptus” Rating: NC-17 This story is a sequel to Coitus Experimentus. ((((((((((((((((((((((( Part 4 )))))))))))))))))))))))
The worst of it was that as his energy sloped away from her, she could sense his main rage wasn’t directed at her, or even at himself. It was simply a miserable fury at the universe that threw them constantly, illogically together—that brewed up bizarre, unkeepable children—and then took away any chance they had of making it work. They had decided they didn’t want kids right now. No babies. They had all the time in the world. But directly they detangled their nouns and tenses, they both realised that it had been simply a monumental underestimation of their own desires. Of course that was just stupid, he realised. Of course they would want a child. They’d met two of their own damn kids already for God’s sake and still had yet to spend a day as parents. It was a little late to pretend they were still swinging, non-gestational explorers, with thoughts for naught but career. Their own shocked reactions to their simultaneous experience of the new being’s mind erased any doubts over that. It was so easy to go along, speaking and thinking of “children” in general…as an item to tick off one’s life-laundry-list: education, career, travel, children…. “Children” was different than “child”. A child. This child. Their child. Suddenly not as hypothetical. Still too late. Trip realised, as he made his way swiftly and blindly to his own quarters, that there was no way T’Pol could have expected that any unlikely and newly-conceived germ of life would actually be able to contact them. She had mentioned being aware, vaguely, of Elizabeth’s presence…enough to know that “they” were telling the truth about her. But just now, she had recoiled with as much shock as he at the discovery of their electric progeny. Neither had known or seen anything like it before. He was amazed that she could even tell what the thing had been, it had packed such a punch. Faint pride stirred, and then instantly curdled within his belly. The fact that she was as horrified as he by the implications of what had just transpired—their too-late changes of heart, their accidental meeting of their impossible baby—did not help him feel any better. In fact, he realised with renewed pain, their bond would only serve to multiply both their reactions upon one another. They could send one another to the moon, or drag themselves, broken and bleeding, down a slagheap of scree…depending which way their combined emotions chose to fly. They certainly weren’t doing any conscientious directing. Trip approached his quarters with such overwhelming relief he thought he might weep ridiculously right here in the corridor. He sped up to swiftly travel the last fifteen feet of corridor between him and his escape. And so, of course, Malcolm rounded the corner, dressed for the gym, step slowing suddenly at the sight of his haggard friend (musing silently that Fraxian flu looked extremely nasty and progressive). Trip’s face held an expression Malcolm didn’t think he’d seen before. If he wasn’t sure he knew better, he’d have thought Trip was about to break down and cry. Trip misread Malcolm’s look of faint horror as heralding another round of super-hilarious banter and general good times for all. “Stow, it Mal,” Trip barked. “Just stow it.” He bit the end of his sentence off like a wet cigar and stabbed his door release, disappearing into his quarters. Malcolm stood stock-still in his scanty clothing. “I didn’t say anything,” he defended faintly to no one in particular. * * * T’Pol finally lost her direct connection to Trip as he boiled away from her quarters. She could sense him now as a background hum undercutting her own misery, but nothing more. This baby who had suddenly dropped into her life was another story. The sense of its pulsating reality thickened slightly with each passing minute, and T’Pol could almost imagine it persistently doubling its cells in number, pressing outward into existence…before it hit a critical point in the next ten hours or so and ran fatally short of the specifically mutated enzymes it would require as a hybrid species. Her heart twisted with dread at the futile thought of experiencing its small flame snuffed. Would she notice? Would it simply fade away? A part of her would die away as it withered, she was sure. Illogical and wretched, cheek still pressed—childlike—into the rough, stinging, synthetic carpet, T’Pol closed her eyes. She had expected her sense of total independence to deepen with each passing year of her life, as it had done as neatly as clockwork for the first sixty-three. However, since she had joined this ship, T’Pol was finding that only when she was at the side of the peculiar human man Trip was she at her best. And after knowing him for years, covertly scrutinizing him for years, she could clearly see that she, too, brought out the best in him…in a way that nothing else did. They went so well together. It was so natural. Why did it under no circumstances ever seem to work? Never had she been more abjectly miserable in her life. This moment now replaced as her worst-ever the morning after her wedding: waking up alone in a monastery: facing a life of solitude. For what else was there to speak of life without Trip, except its overriding loneliness? She was a logical, observant scientist. Test after test had conclusively proven that, when they were divided, she was lost. Why did she constantly do things to destroy any chance they had at happiness? Her own mind answered her: she wasn’t good at happiness. She miserably contemplated the irony of a life that ensured those you cared for most would invariably be the ones you hurt the worst. The ones who would hurt you the worst. It was a new line of thinking for her, as one who had never expected in her life to have to deal with such an entity as ‘hurt‘: in herself or in anyone she cared for. T’Pol writhed upon the floor in a temporarily paralysing anguish of depression. There was not one reason she could think of to move a single centimetre from her spot. She felt as if she would never stir again. They would have to lift her ashen remains out of the rug once Phlox finally decided her ‘flu’ was officially over and they came seeking her. Surely she would have burned up from shame and damnation by then. Thoughts of Phlox prodded irritatingly in her brain as she lay upon her carpet, willing her heart to still itself. She was looking straight at her bed. Where Trip had sat one year ago, holding her hand, trying anything to help raise the stellar weight of grief that crushed them both. His sorrowfully, tearfully optimistic tone as he said the words: “…if a Vulcan and a human ever decided to have a child...it'd probably be okay. That's sort of comforting.” A sob escaped T’Pol’s lips. She sat up decisively and pulled her uniform out of the closet, discarding her wrinkled robe uncharacteristically upon the floor. Dragging the tight thing on, she contorted expertly to zip it up and fumbled in the bottom of her closet for her shoes. * * * Trip lay in his bunk, staring up at the faintly lit mementoes and other objects along the top of his bunk rail. A photo of Lizzie he had tucked away out of sight, but he could glimpse the silver frame peeking from behind his football. He liked having it there, nearby, but he couldn’t stand to look at her smiling young face very often. Prints of the other Elizabeth…his daughter…were non-existent. He had dozens of frames saved in the computer, but he couldn’t yet gaze upon her tiny, doomed face without utter grief filling his lungs and making it too thick and bubbly to breathe. Trip knew that some of the crew privately wondered at his and T‘Pol‘s odd attachment to a child they had no hand in producing and only knew for a few hours. He didn’t care. It simply didn’t matter for some reason. They both had never questioned that: it didn’t matter that they only knew her for a moment. She was their child. And because of that, no matter what else happened in the universe, they were connected forever by a genetic bond of ancient grief, greater than any other: that of outliving one’s progeny. Trip’s tortured conversations with Phlox one year ago resurfaced in his mind. Though he knew that denial was a part of the grieving process, and Phlox had been more than clear about the baby‘s total lack of chances, he couldn’t help expecting that somehow the ingenious doctor would, as he had so many times before, pull a last-second solution out of his capacious pocket. But Elizabeth had died anyway. And they had watched. And that was one reason why Trip never entertained any of the random crew’s speculation. Gossip had absolutely zero significance in the face of real, raw concerns: such as the short life and swift death of a baby before one’s helpless eyes. The good doctor had been able to offer them only one small comfort: that if a Vulcan and a human ever decided to have a child, it’d probably be okay. Trip had lived by those words—a sort of unconscious mantra—since the day they had laid Elizabeth to rest. And now the universe was taking that from him as well. They had a baby. It was not okay. He knew the difference this time lay only in the word ‘decide’. They had thought they wouldn’t want a baby. They had decided not to have this baby. It hadn’t been provided with what it needed to survive. But that was before it existed, and now he wanted to change his mind. Trip found himself filling with an antsy, obsessive, time-sensitive urge to run to Phlox and shove him and T’Pol into the imaging chamber and not let them out again until he’d fixed her up somehow. * * * T’Pol paced the large room, blindly examining each of the pointed bottles of vibrant liquid Phlox had ranged upon the shelves. “Commander, please,” Phlox entreated. His large frame was clad in his voluminous pyjamas and the lights were on half power. T’Pol stopped at a particularly pungent cage, peering blearily down at its mesh cover. Phlox tried again, his voice more serious and exasperated. “Commander T’Pol, I must ask you to lie down.” T’Pol looked up at Phlox, her eye hardening. “Will a stint in your imaging chamber change your diagnosis?” Phlox sighed. “No,” he answered honestly, but reluctantly. “Then I can see no purpose to the scan.” T’Pol turned and paced away again, not noticing the illogic of her obvious desire to loiter about Sickbay though she was uninterested in any examination. “With this device, I cannot yet even confirm your pregnancy.” Phlox waved his hand-held medical scanner at her, as he tried to make her see reason. “The fetus, if it exists, has not yet had time to implant within your uterus. And until it does, this isn’t sensitive enough to tell me much except that your hormonal levels are again fluctuating.” T’Pol eyed the portly man frostily. “It does exist. I am certain of that if nothing else.” Phlox conceded, not questioning her obvious and chilling conviction. “I see,” he replied, as she resumed her anxious walking. For a moment he waited, allowing his brain time to change tack: to storm through possible strategies for dealing with his intransigent patient. He put on his invisible psychologist’s hat, wandering over toward T’Pol’s end of the room, but not coming too close. He lifted a lid to check on his Thracian bat-beetles. “I thought,” Phlox tapped a little food into the greenery, making the bat-beetle cage tremble with famished scurries, “…that you and Commander Tucker weren’t interested in progeny at this time.” He recapped the food and secured the lid of the cage. “That is what you communicated to me yesterday morning when we discussed this.” Phlox turned to find T’Pol standing mutely before the nearby empty incubator. It was stored on its side, various tubes and power modules packed into the dark glass tank. But she reached an un-Vulcanlike finger out to wistfully touch the mechanical thing that had preserved her daughter to her for a few precious extra hours. She didn’t answer him, not trusting her voice. “T’Pol,” Phlox said, speaking her name gently, “I will be the first to admit that you and Commander Tucker have endured more than your fair share of tragedy. But I don’t understand…what has changed since this morning? These aren’t decisions to be made lightly. I wouldn‘t expect you to make them lightly.” T’Pol just looked at him with vulnerable eyes, wondering how to respond. Her methods of expression were severely limited in such matters. She was saved the trouble. The thrice-wedded Phlox divined her sentiments straight from the open, pained look on her face when he asked his question. “Ah,” he responded, with great weight. Compassion filled his crinkly eyes and he smiled slightly and sadly. “I see. You, um…didn’t expect to have feelings for Commander Tucker, did you?” “No,” T’Pol answered, startled into honesty by Phlox’s sudden, accurate diagnosis. She realised how naïve her response sounded, now that she was aware of the enormity of the thing she had asked Trip to participate in. She had no defence, even in her own mind, except the words, I didn’t know. T’hy’la, how could I have known? “And am I correct in assuming that this…er…‘change of heart’ is responsible for your sudden desire to have a child of this mating?” Phlox’s words cut through her sudden wistful lapse and she looked at him. Eyes glittering somewhat dangerously, the distraught woman answered with tattered dignity: “Among other things.” “Commander,” Phlox said, gently—using her rank, as he knew that professional distance always calmed the reticent lady—“you know as well as I do, that for any human/Vulcan embryo to survive the second day of gestation it needs a large supply of tanylase substrate.” Phlox’s warm-hearted voice was steadied by the professionally tragic empathy of a man who had doctored his way through many a dark day. “This unfortunately isn’t a decision that can be made on a whim the day after mating occurs. Any whim,” he added gently, “…no matter how…overwhelming.” T’Pol’s mouth jumped involuntarily at his unexpectedly insightful wording. He continued, not wanting to hammer the point, but needing to satisfy himself that she understood the factors at play behind her emotional requests. “Human mothers must ensure an adequate supply of folic acid before they become impregnated if neural tubes are to form correctly. Your hybrid child is going to have the same need for tanylase if it is to bridge the gap between the different aging processes of your species while gestating. It is a medical fact.” Phlox uttered the last sentence with the finality of one who hated giving the bald news but was inexcusably obliged to. And T’Pol suddenly, surprisingly, turned to him and put her head gently upon his shoulder. For an instant, Phlox didn’t know where to place his wide-held hands and then he let them circle her back slowly and roughly, as he gave her a consoling sort of hug. They stood like that, T’Pol simply hanging on for momentary support in the face of facts that she wanted to physically run from. “Okay, hm?” Phlox soothed calmly, patting her on the back, as if for one of his many children. But he blinked away a sudden speck of moisture from his own eye as he gazed blankly over the top of her bent head. Plenty of patients had hugged him in various states of emotional tumult over the decades of his career, but somehow, Phlox found this simple, fleetingly-unmanaged Vulcan grief to be the most poignant he had ever laid eyes upon. After a moment, he pulled back from her and looked gruffly into her face. “You don’t believe me now,” Phlox assured her, speaking as her friend for a moment, instead of her physician, “but one day you will have a child of your own to hold. A child of Commander Tucker’s, if I may be so bold as to guess. Of this I am almost certain.” The hope in his voice only served to further weight T’Pol’s soul. She looked steadily back at the kindly doctor, a kind of doom in her eyes. “You do not understand,” she persisted. “We had a terrible argument.” At this, Phlox did smile—wryly. “Ah! Good! Nothing like a fight to clear the air and get the real issues out on the table. You need to learn that in a relationship with a non-Vulcan, you will have the odd fight. It will be different than if you’d taken a mate of your own species. For humans, disputes are perfectly normal, and in fact, most desirable for the long-term health of a relationship.” “I called him a ‘pro-lifer’,” T’Pol added, looking shamefacedly at the floor, and biting her lower lip. Her confessor’s face twitched as he grimaced slightly. “Hmm. A rather anomalous choice of vocabulary for you,” Phlox observed. “I surprised myself.” T’Pol flushed emerald at the memory and explained. “He didn’t yet understand the nature of the enzymatic requirements and thought I simply wasn’t willing to take them. He said I was backing out, betraying our child. He likened it to abortion. It was an illogical statement, but I responded anyway before I even realised what I was saying. I was quite…angry.” T’Pol paused at the strangeness of the sentence she had just uttered about herself. After a moment, she continued. “I myself am only vaguely aware of the term as it applies to human society. The word seemed within Trip’s upper thoughts as we…discussed…the issue, and I picked up on it as something that would shock him.” T’Pol remembered Trip’s rapidly angering illogic, a mirror of her own, giving her no time to explain. And then the emotional things they had flung at one another, as the negative energy mounted between them. T’Pol was violently reminded of the good sense her ancestors showed in divorcing emotion from their lives. She closed her eyes in self-loathing painful memory. “I said it to hurt him, simply because what he said hurt me. It was most illogical.” Her mouth twisted slightly at the word he had invoked upon her. “I did not expect that a noun…could…punch one in the stomach.” T’Pol trailed off, her voice faintly nauseous, remembering the look on Trip’s face as he shouted his personal beliefs so damningly at her. The look on his face as she had done the same, twisting sharp pieces of his own thoughts and throwing them unexpectedly back at him. Phlox looked at her strangely. He had never before heard her make a simile. “You are becoming surprisingly poetical these days,” he observed. T’Pol blinked away her recollections and continued as if Phlox hadn’t spoken. “I realise that it was an extremely inappropriate choice of words,” she said glumly of her earlier remark. Phlox weighed her comment, considering. “Perhaps. It depends on one’s point of view. How did Trip take it?” T’Pol eyed him. “Not well.” “It is still an extremely inflammatory label to most humans,” Phlox conceded. “Their fascinating debates on the subject have gone on for centuries, and likely will continue to do so as long as they gestate their children internally. The word itself is a bit of a misnomer in my medical opinion. I dare say few people would consider a ‘pro-death’ stance, yet the word persists even today, among extremist groups on both sides.” Phlox shook his head, as he somewhat affectionately considered the oddities of humans. He looked up and inquired gently, “What specifically did Commander Tucker say?” T’Pol thought back, her eyes haunted and unfocused. “That I wasn’t ‘some fifteen-year-old’ who got impregnated by her ‘deadbeat’ boyfriend. He said…” T’Pol trailed off remembering, and her voice was quiet as she finished: “He said ‘it’s different when it’s your own damn kid’.” Her throat ached. Phlox nodded once, absorbing both sides of the bleak issue. “The whole exchange was inaccurate,” he finally observed. “The issue of abortion is not a question in your case. Both of you decided before mating that children were not in your current plans. Thus the mating took place without any of the steps needed to ensure pregnancy.” “I explained that to him,” T’Pol said. “And?” “He left the room,” she answered, her voice hollow. “May I ask how you became aware of the child’s presence in the first place?” Phlox inquired delicately, momentarily changing the subject back to her physical condition, now that she had opened up a little. T’Pol’s face was ruddy green with emotion as she responded, recalling the most bizarre experience of her life thus far—just less than an hour ago. “The plak-tau has initiated a strong mating bond between Commander Tucker and I that I did not expect…given past…experience.” T’Pol did not elaborate on said experience, and Phlox didn’t ask her to. “And through this bond, you sensed a fetal presence?” he guessed, wondering with medical exasperation exactly how little of the Vulcan physiology and habits were actually documented in their public database. From the paucity of material on anything remotely approaching bodily functions, one would practically have to assume they received the carbon to form their bodies from the air. And excreted it—plant-like—just as innocently—in the form of sweet-smelling oxygen. “We both did,” T’Pol answered, looking up at him with large, almost frightened eyes. “Forcefully. It was…most…unusual.” Phlox read in her face what her mild words left out. Unusual. Incredible. Mind-bending. Heart-stopping. All the things that seeing or sensing or hearing a child’s first quickenings are to the parents that give it life. He knew well-enough the ideas that gripped one’s mind at these times…and later on, if things went badly. This grim familiarity came from the loss of his own third child early into his second wife‘s pregnancy. Compassion was his chosen career, and Phlox doled it out skilfully, but he well knew it was a mere salve on the burns of T’Pol’s grief. Only time would cover those over. Nonetheless, he took on a consoling tone as he added, “I think that Trip was likely overwhelmed by the events of the last short while. He needed some space to think. He will want to speak to you once he has had a chance to cool down, hm?” Phlox leaned down slightly to look into T’Pol’s downcast eyes. She flicked her gaze up to meet his. “How can you be so sure?” she asked in a faint, hurt voice not unlike the one she used ages ago when speaking with her elderly self. Phlox smiled with paternal benevolence. “Turn around.” T’Pol looked over her shoulder. Visible through the windows embedded in the double doors, Trip was standing in the corridor outside Sickbay, still in his sweats, hands on his hips. He gazed through the portals at the distraught face of his Vulcan lover. The mother of his many children. Sniffing and heaving a sigh to clear his chest, he forced himself to walk forward in order that he might discuss all manner hideous things with his partner and his physician. The doors parted and Trip entered, for one totally randomized moment, feeling as if he were pushing through the saloon doors in an old West town. The sinister suspense was there. The possible foes awaiting him inside were present. All that was missing were a few six-shooters and a lonely, high-pitched soundtrack. He forgot his tangential mental ramblings as he came face to face again with T’Pol. The last hour had not been good to her. Her eyes were stamped with a grief that was made all the more powerful in its absolute value: since the heights from which it had suddenly plunged were so dizzying. He knew the feeling. Phlox felt common etiquette urged him to leave the two together to speak privately; however, knowing these particular two as well as he did, he steadfastly stayed right there, making the conversation at least a mediation if not a totally three-way effort. There would be nothing gained if either of them stormed away, or attacked, in misinformed wrath. Trip heaved a sigh after staring rudely at the doc long enough to realize that he wasn’t leaving. He turned to T‘Pol, trying to ignore the other man. “Hi,” he said. T’Pol swallowed, forcing the lump that had come into her throat to descend again into the pit of snakes that was her stomach. “Hi,” she managed to whisper. The exchange was an olive branch: a cease-fire so that both parties could form a treaty. Phlox restrained his natural urge to add to the pleasantries, simply watching both for signs of sudden rage or apoplexy. Trip sighed again and put his hands on the knobbly fabric surface of the biobed that he had unconsciously but strategically placed between himself and T’Pol. Phlox hovered, referee-like, at the foot and T’Pol stayed well on her own side of the obstacle. Trip looked back up at his mate. His first fit of self-righteous rage was cooling, and he was ashamed now at his own flare-up, especially in a matter so delicate and crucial as this. Emotional outbursts would do nothing except drive her away completely, he realised. The bond they shared was deluging him covertly with her loud emotions as well as his own. He belatedly had comprehended the fact that the bond was surely a two-way street. Raging within his own mind would likely only direct rage outward at him from T’Pol in a loop of self-destructive feedback. She never had been particularly adept, in his opinion, at hiding any strong emotions. He didn’t mind. Far from it: if she wasn’t open to the concept of emotional expression, there would have been no hope for them at all. They wouldn’t even have come as far as they had done, precious little though it seemed today. But ever since T’Pol had lost it aboard the Seleya, Trip had been sure she had never fully recovered her smooth Vulcan aplomb somehow. Perhaps it was the many months they had spent within the poisonous Expanse. He considered the strains she had been under during the last two years. He watched her eyes. And as Trip focused on her face, he forgot about making his point known in terms of complicated arguments and premises. He simply wanted this unexpected child of theirs to live. Everything else was just rhetoric and distraction. And if that was impossible…well, then he wanted another one. With her. Whatever the hell else happened, that was what he wanted. In the last twenty-fours hours, Trip had become a changed man. He wasn’t sure if it was for the better or not, but he was positive of one thing: he could no more morph back into the person he had been on Monday morning than he could grow himself that uterus T’Pol had mentioned so snidely in the heat of their devastated, horrible argument. All of this takes time to write down, but these thoughts burned through Trip’s mind as quickly and deftly as a flame burns through paper. T’Pol watched Trip’s face as he endured each of the stream-of-sensation things that occurred to his human heart in the sudden, overwhelming presence of herself. She wasn’t sure yet how aware he was of their bond when he wasn’t concentrating on it, but she could, at this close range and with the force he was radiating outward, easily sense the basic themes of his mind’s tide. Anger. At both of them for their eternal inability to communicate. Sadness. At both of them. At her for hurting him, and at himself, for failing always, in the moment, to understand her. He knew they were from alien worlds: why couldn’t he try harder to compensate for it? And, worst: despair. Again, for both of them. Trip could not understand any universe—be it populated with many deities or none—that would allow such misfortunes to so consistently and cruelly dog two individual people. T’Pol lived broad versions of each of these, Trip’s thoughts, as they free-associated within his brain. His main overriding concern capped all: a frenetic desire to have Phlox perform a timely miracle. Knowing how fruitless it was, but unable to resist asking again in the face of Trip’s broadcast urgency, T’Pol saved all other thoughts and words for a less-critical time. She turned to the physician who stood passively at her left. “Phlox,” she entreated, in a low, unusual tone, “surely there must be some avenue of potential treatment that we can explore. Something we haven‘t tried.” She looked not at Phlox, but regarded Trip as she spoke for both of them. Trip’s eyes met hers strongly. He was not able to sense her mind as discretely as she could his own, but he could feel a faint flickering, a return to life, of the bruised, beaten thing that was his mate’s untried heart as she realised finally that he wasn‘t simply devastated for himself, he was devastated for them as a pair. That pairing still existed firmly within his mind. She thanked she knew not what for his commitment. Trip, too, saved other words for later, simply taking her hand now—when it mattered—and looking at Phlox with grim, hopeless eyes. Phlox tried and failed to meet their faces as he spoke. He addressed the sterile fabric of the biobed surface instead, as he patiently reiterated what he had been saying all along: “I am extremely sorry, but there is no way that giving T’Pol the enzymes now will help. The blastocyst is already in need of them and it would take days for sufficient levels to build in T’Pol’s body as to render the environment suitable for a human-Vulcan hybrid. Your two species’ growth rates are simply…too different.” Phlox tried not to speak the last word as a judgement of their entire relationship, and yet it came out sounding that way to everyone in the room. Too different. T’Pol swallowed and looked down at Trip’s hand, limp and cold in her own. Trip looked upward as if to study the faintly dusty ceiling, but he was attempting to drain away a sudden excess of fluid upon his eyeballs without having it trickle pointlessly down his cheeks. It didn’t help, as the tear simply slipped past his outer canthus and dribbled into his ear canal. But the uncomfortably runny sensation helped him regain control, and he tipped his face back to normal, one sideways teartrack clinging wetly to his temple in the cool of Sickbay. He sniffled faintly, nodding, about to speak, when T’Pol’s voice broke relatively strongly into the silence. She had been watching Phlox’s dismal, self-abusive countenance. “You have committed no error, Doctor,” T’Pol said. “The error was mine alone in underestimating the nature of…a child of ours.” All of their children had proved to be exceptional in one way or another. She looked again to Trip, whose mouth curled up faintly on one side. Not much of a smile, more a promise of the possibility of future smiles, but for T’Pol that was more than enough to go on. Somehow, somehow, it seemed they were each taking steps forward: one-at-a-time, slogging their way excruciatingly, but mutually, through this hideous bog of pain they found themselves prisoner of. Phlox looked somewhat gratified, but he refused to allow T’Pol more than her share of the blame in this. He shook his head sorrowfully as he spoke, his natural reticence again forcing him to address his hands, but his real concern for his two oft-troubled crewmates came clearly through in his voice: “T’Pol, I am sure that you have your private regrets over things said or done or not done. But I too would be dishonest if I did not admit that in hindsight I was negligent for not counselling you more thoroughly at the time you made your decisions.” Phlox dragged his eyes to her pale, sad face. “You are an exceptional woman,” he insisted, “a fine officer…but you are not a superbeing. Even the strongest of us have our weak points; and in light of what yours are, I should have known that this would be a decision you would struggle to make. No matter which course you chose.” Trip watched the cryptic exchange between T’Pol and her physician, realizing that Phlox must know many strange and peculiar secrets about the feisty brain and slim body that stood here so penitent and downtrodden before them. T’Pol felt this flash of faintly envious curiosity from Trip, and vowing to hold back no more in the face of what miscommunication had done to them, she lifted her chin and looked at him strongly, though her lower lip jumped spasmodically and microscopically. “I intentionally exposed myself to Trellium while we were in the Expanse, in order to increase the potency of my emotions. Though I stopped soon after, I have never fully recovered.” T’Pol explained clearly and with neither malice nor defence. Trip’s eyes widened in shock for a reflexive instant, while he squelched his initial urges to shout something about Vulcans who went looking for the Trellium they had all endangered themselves to avoid. It was easier to manage than he would have guessed at first. For though she said nothing more, her motivations gently washed past his psychic ears and he saw that she had ensnared herself whilst in the grips of some misguided effort to understand him. As with all addiction, she had not seen the massive error of her ways until it almost seemed too late. Rubbing his face for the third time that day, Trip wondered at the sheer ability of man to confuse things that beasts found simple—and mused that their collective anguish-ridden dramas would make for a nice stock of angsty, semi-romantic reading. An archive of sorts. Finally, he folded his arms across his chest and kicked the base of the biobed gently as if testing it. Head nodding of its own accord, Trip swiftly reshuffled the cards of the last two years. Several extremely significant things made a lot more sense to him now. In a way he had known. Certainly he hadn’t divined the extent or the ghastliness of her trouble, but he had known that something serious was bothering her…and he hadn’t really tried to pry it out of her resistant soul. Never guessing that he himself was at the core of it all, Trip reckoned it wasn’t his job to meddle, and let that be the excuse that allowed him to pass her day after day without asking the uncomfortable questions friends should always ask of one another when they see certain signs or symptoms. T’Pol’s mouth tightened as she sensed the persistently rationalizing and forgiving things that were running through Trip’s mind. She had revealed the outrageous fact of her Trellium abuse because she suddenly couldn’t bear anymore the shame and catastrophe of hiding anything. If he was going to abandon her now, she at least was gong to make sure she had confessed all her crimes. But almost frustratingly? for her, Trip had shifted into a new, more vital gear that was allowing him to easily sort through information as he received it, discarding those things that mattered little while clinging fast to those that were truly dear. His priorities and certainties had changed, she realized, in one of those rare korsovaya moments that few people in the universe would experience in their lifetimes: a pivotal point in which one has the power to form reality around oneself as tangibly as a cloak—with a simple, powerful redirection of one’s energies. When you realise what is important to you. She finally understood that her own torment was coming partly from the fact that fate was calling for a similar transformative revelation on her part and the long-followed, habitual ruts of her thinking were resisting any turning of the wheels. Recognition of this fact as she looked into Trip’s grieving but oddly vibrant face was the key and countersign to her intransigence. Gently, humbly, she unbuilt her walls. They fell away as silk as soon as she stopped holding them there. Apprentice-like, she felt around in the new shapes of Trip’s thoughts. He was certain now, she saw with a quiet certainty of her own, that they were meant to be together—and to join themselves to create a third person, if not more. Something in his universe had awoken upon the ashes of their mutual desolation and was now prodding him to take action in the new direction as efficaciously as possible. No more time to waste for personal drama. Phlox watched his two friends and patients staring into one another’s eyes with the ancient look he had shared a few times in his own life with women who were now light-years away. Unnoticed, he smiled with a mixture of nostalgia and queer sadness as he finally turned to a task across the room, leaving them to speak semi-privately. He was fairly certain that they weren’t going to kill one another now. T’Pol swallowed as she examined the ridiculous blue of Trip’s eyes. Her own filled with tears at the sight of those eyes: still watching her with love, even after everything. She had not expected it. Unable to see him properly anymore, the water on her lenses bending the light into senseless rainbows, she skirted around the biobed and put her arms strongly and simply around his middle. She buried her face in his warm, Trip-smelling T-shirt as she whispered, “I’m so sorry.” Trip’s arms clasped protectively around her as he closed his eyes and put his nose down into her soft, warm hair. They stood like that, drawing strength from one another and sharing their thoughts and apologies and happiness and grief in a vague bluster of invisible energy that crossed the flesh barriers between their souls. Inhaling still hurt, but it was somewhat easier when they were holding their heartache up together. T’Pol reflected as she stood there within Trip’s embrace that, with all they had been through together, it would be illogical for each of them to try and look for kindred companionship elsewhere. At this, free associative memories of black and white scenes from an old movie surfaced in Trip’s brain and washed past T’Pol. If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard. Trip pulled back a little and kissed T’Pol’s forehead, smoothing her hair back. She looked up at him. “What is this strange movie you keep thinking of?” Trip smiled at her abrupt, temporary side-trip into something random. His brain felt the relief palpably as he relaxed into the moment for a blissful second, looking back down at her perplexed face. “Wizard of Oz again, sorry. And y’know, I always thought that Dorothy’s line about her heart’s desire seemed kinda stupid. But for some reason it fits here. It fits you and me.” Trip’s face smoothed back into grief and he looked at her hands in his own. “T’Pol, I’m pretty sure I know who I’m supposed to be with. And if you feel the same way, then…I just can’t see why we go on torturing ourselves. We can’t walk this line forever.” “I agree,” T’Pol said softly. Indeed, she felt as if he had taken the words right from her mouth. Trip looked down at her, unable to grasp how simple that had been. He nodded once, in shock, and pulled her close again. T’Pol spoke, the side of her face again against his shirt, her voice filled with genuine pain. “I am sorry for the things I said. I didn’t mean any of them. I don’t know why I said them.” Trip sighed into the empty space above her fragrant hair. “Me too. And me neither. It’s just what happens when you fight…y’say stupid things that you feel horrible about later. The whole history of my planet’s based on that trick. You Vulcans may have it right after all. No emotions, no fights.” “It’s not worth the trade,” T’Pol replied, surprising herself somewhat with her fervent reply. It was going to take a while for each of them to realise the potentialities of their new connection. Thoughts weren’t entirely their own any more, even as they created them. And it was a sensation so easy to fall into: that of ignoring their physical bodies and phasing their attention entirely into the responsive new world of the mind. As Phlox puttered aimlessly at the other end of the room, Trip and T’Pol simply held on to one another, their connected minds healing their joint wounds: Nature’s way of ensuring lifetime bondmates couldn’t easily become estranged. Trip allowed his own thoughts free, unconscious rein as he watched the complex and flickering ideas of the woman he loved playing mournfully through the air around them. It was a fascinating, heady thing to look into another’s mind, especially one so important to his own. He didn’t notice at first when she scented a strange passing notion, one he never called upon purposefully, but which nevertheless ran through his mind in seemingly random shots of painful recollection at odd times for the past two years. The events of tonight had reared it full-bore back into the launching pad of his brain, and T’Pol easily swam through and around a dossier of mental information and sensations relating to someone…called Erin? The mental utterance of the name caught Trip’s attention away from where he had been quietly watching a half-forgotten memory of a young T’Pol and a smaller child playing by a fountain. He hooked instead onto the stream of memory T’Pol had accessed, and watched it with her. Erin was a year younger than him. A year older than Elizabeth. They had spent their summers together along with their parents: tanned, bug-bitten, and wild, exploring the bayous of Florida’s national parkland and camping in the wilderness edging the Everglades. Erin had always been the toughest of all the kids: breaking her leg testing a tree swing they had made themselves, putting her feet in leech-infested water for the fun of it, swimming easily and repeatedly through the rock tunnel under the lake they always spent two weeks at in August. They had been expressly forbidden to swim the tunnel. But one time in his twelfth year, emasculated by his younger cousin’s sheer metaphorical balls, he had tried it. Trip’s blood still ran ice cold anytime he recalled the sharp black rocks of the deep tunnel and the dizzy disorientation that had gripped him as he turned around partway through and returned the way he came. Heart thumping erratically, teeth clenched, he nearly ran out of air under the cold, dark, clicking water. The fake Technicolor of the live, unconcerned children playing on the rocks as he surfaced smacked his soul back through his choking, sucking lips: leaving him blinking and mouthing like a fish, trembling as he made his way out of the innocent-seeming water. Just one of many noisy, wet kids that night, no one had noticed Trip’s spooked shame. Pins and needles electrified his lips and fingers and the tip of his nose for the rest of the evening. His toes persisted in maintaining a deadman’s clammy aspect, no matter how many socks he put on, and they ached through the long hours of his dream-swathed, wakish sleep. But when next day his cousin Philip started in about swimming the tunnel, Erin had authoritatively changed the group’s plans, insisting instead upon relay races over the beach and swimming to a dock out on the lake. Trip recalled the shrewd look his eleven year old girl-cousin had flashed him as they tore away across the shore together; as Trip dug his toes, cleat-like, into the hot, dry sand—gratefully straining his live, young, meatcage body upon the medium in which it was meant to run. T’Pol could smell the pungent metallic lake-beach odour, could feel the gritty sand under her toenails. The memory was now as one of her own, and she thus ‘recalled’ the person Erin, this cousin that Trip had been thinking of. That wouldn’t have been a memory Trip would have chosen to reveal, but there was no choice in the liberally honest give and take of their minds. It was as sweetly heartless as lakewater over a boy’s head, or proteins missing in a womb—simply, glibly, Nature in her mad swirl of electrons. T’Pol drank the experience in as it pulled her inexorably along. She felt Trip’s longheld respect for his spirited cousin transplanted into her own brain for examination. Erin’s trials at school: passionate teenage advocacy for positive change falling, as it often did, upon deafly disapproving adult ears. Her surprising decision at the age of eighteen to join the Peace Corps. The man she had met while stationed in India. The twins she had conceived. The only decision she had ever allowed herself to be pressured into in her entire life. And then after. When she had come home to Florida, mute and shattered. The family thought that the troubles she had witnessed firsthand in the East had finally grounded her. Trip was the only one who knew different. The only person she had cried in front of… behind the muffling noise of a Halloween barn party complete with fireworks. T’Pol relived the sharp scent of the hay, the acrid chemical smoke of the nearby fireworks. The contrast between the glad shouting voices out in the sparkbloom-laden night and the cold smoothness of a girl’s tangled hair under her (Trip’s) chastely soothing hand. The thick quality of the girl’s tearful voice as she whispered against Trip’s shoulder, “I killed my babies.” “Y’did not,” Trip had contradicted quietly, simply hugging his cousin hard and letting her cry. “That’s horrible. You said it was only a week. It’s not the same thing.” She had sniffled for a moment, hearing his words, but then she swallowed, and her voice was quietly brimful of bitter, newly-lessoned wisdom: “Yes it is,” she replied, and her flat statement left no room for discussion. “I pray it never happens to you Trip. But if it ever does, you’ll know exactly how I feel.” The eighteen-year-old girl betrayed a wisdom far greater than he ever would have imagined, Trip realised, looking back on that awful night. She had gone home to her bed and never mentioned it again. Trip had taken Eddie and Philip on in a drinking game and woke up the next day with the first sick hangover of his life. Seventeen years had passed. And now it felt like yesterday. “What happened to her?” T’Pol asked. Each of Trip’s memories of the girl were tinged with the rosy after-lens that only the curator of death could invoke. She asked since she didn’t want to simply dig for the memory herself, especially if it was painful. Trip’s old inner wound contracted a little at her question, as it did at anything that invoked the mass and microscopic horrors of 4/24. Two years later, he was improving somewhat, but still had a long way to go. “Was she one of them?” T’Pol asked softly. “The seven million?” Trip asked. “Yeah. She was. She still lived in the old hometown when the Xindi came knocking. We got lucky actually, only having two members of the family caught. Our friends, the Julians, lost twelve.” Trip looked up, distracted by the mass tragedy of that short attack. “Twelve. Man.” “That does not negate your loss,” T’Pol said gently, knowing how loathe Trip was to permit himself any slack when he felt there were others worse off. “No,” Trip sighed in agreement. “It doesn’t. I have finally realised that. Even after I let myself grieve for…Lizzie…I still hated to think of Erin. They were both so similar. It was just…a lot to ask…y’know?” Trip, tired of losing control of his emotions, tried to modulate his voice with casual lightness as he spoke of the two dead women. It didn’t work. His false voice trembled as he smiled wanly through the words. “Both of ‘em. Whew. Y’know?” T’Pol held his shoulder, frowning in compassion as she watched the human man again muscle down his runaway grief with relatively expert facility. Trip caught her complimentary thought and smiled for real through his suddenly damp eyes. “Yeah, you’ve rubbed off on me over the last few years.” Trip regained his control and nodded to himself before speaking again. “I thought of her the second we touched that…nuclear embryo. She was the only girl I ever met who made no secret of her ‘pro-life’ philosophy. I mean, most people—most humans anyway—know better than to discuss politics, religion, or abortion at the dinner table. Not her.” He smiled to himself, remembering. T’Pol considered his statement. “I have heard similar things said before about these issues. I’m surprised that humans voluntarily censor the dinner table discussion that you all seem to be so fond of.” “Ah, we always manage to think of something to talk about. Besides, it’s not a hard and fast rule…more like a suggestion. Y’know, if you don’t want your head ripped off by cousin Erin, for example. Depends on who’s sitting there too. She and I could argue long into the night—no hard feelings. But she’d always work my brother Eddie up so much, no matter what they were debating, he’d have to go for a walk after to calm down. He’d come in later and apologise,” Trip recalled, laughing. “Erin always looked at him like he was crazy. She didn’t realise they were having a fight. Then they’d argue about that.” “Your family sounds…intriguing.” Trip could see that the word she had chosen didn’t reflect her conflicting, mystified feelings, but she had been unable to think of a different one. “Well, they’re outspoken, anyway,” Trip agreed. He stopped for a moment, looking at the woman he had suddenly decided to commit his life to. “I…well, one day anyway, I’d like to introduce them to you.” T’Pol’s face softened at his tone and she looked back into his eyes, as she recalled his own preconceived notions about her when they’d first met. “Do you think they’d like to meet me?” she asked honestly. “I’m certain of it,” Trip replied firmly. “It’s the first time my particular family will have to welcome an ‘alien’ member, but really, they treat all potential mates as alien intruders until they get to know them. And then for a while afterward, too. 10 or 20 years. You’ll fit right in. You can come up to the lake with me, and you and Aunt Jackie and my brother’s wife can sit in the corner with the other married-ins and whisper to one another under the Tuckerish roar of conversation. I’d recommend Philip’s bride as well, but they only lasted two months. I never even met her.” T’Pol marvelled at the increase in Trip’s energy since he has started reminiscing about his family. She had heard similar, Vulcan-style tales of family get-togethers from her friends and acquaintances growing up. Envy had never been an emotion she struggled with in her youth, except when she looked at the large, doting families of others. Her own line had dwindled significantly in the last couple of generations, as they tended to do if one or two members of adjacent generations decided not to have children. Her parents had no siblings and her grandparents had long passed away. A look into the Vulcan genealogical database would have yielded plenty of second cousins once removed and other similar relations, but she had never met any of them. Trip heard her wistful musings and let her see that her family, or lack thereof, made no difference to him, except where it affected her. Joking aside, he let her see his good, solid family members via the lens of his own memories…some childlike, some in his adult years, the most recent tinged with severe, transformative grief. But in every case, T’Pol could see that the Tuckers were fundamentally good people who loved their space-faring son to pieces and worried every single time he left the surface. The complex emotions associated with moms and dads and sisters and growing up human suddenly became too much for her and she inhaled and gently blocked Trip out for a moment to gain her sense of perspective back. “Sorry,” Trip said looking sheepish. T’Pol shook her head and opened the door again halfway to resumed the gentle stream of warm thoughts and images they shared. “You don’t think your family will object to your Vulcan bride?” Trip smiled at her choice of words, trying to make her see the distinction. “Yeah, I don’t really know. A Vulcan bride might make them uncomfortable. I can just picture Mom looking up Vulcan table settings on the internet and worrying if shrimp forks could double as yarmok forks.” T’Pol sensed he was going somewhere and waited. “But my bride they will love. No matter who she is.” Trip meant it. His family had always supported him, no matter what his choices. T‘Pol didn‘t understand. “All you did was remove the adjective ‘Vulcan’. You don’t intend me to wear a hat while I’m there do you?” Trip laughed aloud at her insinuation. “No, we’ll tell ‘em that you’re Vulcan. What I mean is we won’t label you Vulcan. You should just be yourself…whatever that happens to be.” T’Pol nodded, finally seeing the fine distinction he was making, but unsure it could possibly matter. “You think such a subtle thing would make a difference?” she asked sceptical. “Absolutely,” Trip affirmed. “People will take their cue from you…whatever that is. On Earth, labels of any kind are bound to piss someone off. Never are two people alike enough that you can lump ‘em together, let alone a whole group.” Trip, reflecting that this was true of all people, asked, “You don’t run into a similar thing on Vulcan?” “No.” T’Pol considered. “We use nouns to label the various tangible and intangible things on our world. That is all. There is no emotional attachment or excitement to be gained from something as innocuous as a word.” Trip raised his eyebrows. “What about the word ‘Kir’Shara‘?” he asked, “Or…‘v’tosh ka’tur’? Isn’t that how you say it?” T’Pol lifted a brow in concession. “You always seem to have a ready answer,” she mused, “perhaps you should have been a lawyer.” This drew a surprised bark of laughter from Trip, who had never before considered himself in such a role…for even an instant. T’Pol picked up her earlier thread logic: “Those examples are isolated. In general, Vulcan does not share Earth’s conflicting passion and contempt for labels.” She looked sincerely at Trip. “That being said, the rather archaic word I chose to use in anger is one I have found illogically jarring on the few occasions I have ever been faced with it. As Phlox said earlier, one would certainly have difficulty finding ‘pro-death’ foes with which to debate.” “True,” Trip agreed. “That’s why I always hated the fact that Erin loved it. She really was something, a force to be reckoned with. But as soon as she’d bring out that word, all hell’d break loose. My family…we’re not exactly conversationally restrained. My brother used to shriek scientific facts about when exactly pain-centres are supposed to develop and great-grandma would moan about the horrors of the Eugenics wars, but quietly y’know, in her own corner.” Trip shifted to memories of his brother. “Man, you wouldn’t expect a thirteen-year-old boy to even comprehend abortion, let alone spend time formulating theories regarding it. But that’s Eddie. He shoulda been the lawyer.” Trip smiled to himself, dwelling on his brother, before realising something: “I guess labels aren’t as touchy on a planet where no one is touchy.” T’Pol considered this. “I suppose that is true for the most part. But you were correct in the examples you used. I myself recall now the shock I felt at hearing my mother’s name linked to the Syrranites’. I suppose it can be logical to be affected by things that are simply said aloud…depending on what kind of history they are invoking.” “That’s a great way of putting it,” Trip said as he listened to her thoughts and her words in tandem. “You invoked a lot of history with that word. There have been ‘pro-lifers’ who have shot abortion doctors dead in their parking lots. There have been ‘pro-choicers’ who have shot ‘pro-lifers’ dead in their parking lots. And all in the name of what? Who knows anymore? The whole thing has been madness ever since science figured out how to mess with pregnancy. Terra Prime types with their black and white philosophies polarize the debate even more. And I guess I’m especially wired to blow given my personal experiences.” Trip realised, as he spoke his mind, that they were both right. Words were powerful. But they were also just words. Easy to say. Easy to put aside. He finally, impatiently, rooted for the real core of his hurt and then said it simply, “I guess I was just shocked that she was right. I do know exactly how she feels. Even though what you an’ I are faced with isn’t like the choice she had to make, I do realise now that a baby’s a baby. Even if it’s only twelve hours old. Whatever people choose to do with that information is up to them, I guess. But there‘s no clouding the truth. She was right about that.” T’Pol had listened carefully throughout Trip’s mild explanatory rant. The emotions behind his necessarily clumsy words illuminated the many facets of the knotty issue they struggled with and his corresponding opinions. Both were realising as they properly worked through something—together, for the first time in their lives—that the only hope for either of them was figuring out what the other one was about, and quickly. And though they considered themselves far more than best friends, there were large swaths of blind landscape still to be filled in. Phlox noticed their conversation calming slightly and he began to make his way across the room towards them. If Commander Tucker had sufficiently pacified her, Phlox thought, it was possible he would be able to coax T’Pol into the imaging chamber. Any information he could gather on this pregnancy, no matter how brief, would be invaluable as he doctored her through any future pregnancies. And from the way they had both spoken, he was rather certain that the issue might arise in the future. However, as Phlox traversed the centre of the bay, Archer’s voice cut across the ship: “All hands: brace for impact.” Trip and T’Pol automatically grabbed the edge of the biobed they stood next to. Phlox, in the centre of the floor, simply squatted swiftly down on the spot, hoping that whatever the captain was looking at wouldn’t send him bowling across the floor. It did. The ship rocked violently, but almost smoothly in its pitch. Not weapons fire; more a throttling. The motion lasted about ten brutal seconds, during which Phlox rolled himself into a protective ball and Trip and T’Pol sank to their knees next to the edge they clutched, white-knuckled. Finally, after what felt like minutes, the motion ceased as abruptly as it had hit. No one moved for ten more seconds, making sure that the vicious shaking had stopped, and then Phlox pushed himself painfully to his knees. He had been thrown fifteen feet sideways and had crashed rather inelegantly against his cupboards. But aside from tipping a few of his bottles, he and his Sickbay seemed fortuitously unharmed. He stiffly stood and looked back to check the commanders. They seemed shaken, but also unhurt, as they warily gained their footing. “No broken bones?” Phlox called out for confirmation, as he quickly stabbed his damage and casualty report for the section into the computer and sent it up to the bridge along with everyone else’s. No one had a chance to open their mouths, however, before Archer’s disembodied voice again addressed them, this time speaking to Phlox. “Doctor, are Trip and T’Pol out of quarantine yet?” The doctor looked at them. Trip nodded. “Actually, yes, Captain,” Phlox replied. “They are both here now actually. I’ve just given them a clean bill of health.” “Good,” Archer replied. “Don’t let them go anywhere. I’ll be right down. Archer out.” Silence filled the room as the captain cut his transmission. “Don’t go anywhere,” Phlox advised the others, though the captain’s loud voice had been more than audible to everybody. “He’ll be right down.” Trip wondered if everyone was secretly imitating the captain except him. “Not everyone,” T’Pol whispered. “Ensign Lefter does a remarkably accurate impression of the chief engineer.” Trip tried to scowl at her but ended up smiling. She smiled in a way too, but sadly, and took his hand for a moment. Trip’s mouth tightened as he looked at her, remembering again why they were here. Phlox had pulled out his scanner and was using it awkwardly on his own lumbar region ensuring that he was merely bruised. T’Pol watched his contortions for a moment, before crossing the floor and gently taking his scanner from him. She turned him away from her with a firm hand to his shoulder and proceeded to carefully scan the length of his spine and across the back of his pelvis. When she was complete, she turned the device around to read its small screen. Phlox looked back over his shoulder when she stopped scanning and saw her tapping away interestedly at the results with a scientific crook to her brow. The doctor smiled uncomfortably and put his hand out for the device. “Thank you, commander.” “You are welcome.” T’Pol glanced up briefly, before continuing her analysis. “This scan reveals a disturbing build-up of lactic acid around the eleventh vertebral sac. I would recommend you undergo a more thorough assessment, in order that you may diagnose your injury more accurately.” T’Pol stepped to the nearby imaging chamber and pressed a control, ejecting its narrow stretcher out into the room. Her expectant gaze implied that she would have Phlox climb up. The smile gone from his face as he was dosed with his own marsupial saliva, Phlox snatched at the scanner T’Pol still held in her hand. Blinking, she allowed him to grab it from her passive palm, managing to merely look mildly inquisitive as he did so. Phlox narrowed his eyes at her as he skulked away to inspect his own spinal scan, acutely aware of the enjoyment the Vulcan was taking in turning the tables on him. He hated being examined. T’Pol looked over her shoulder at Trip and gave a deadpan shrug in reply to his grin, before both were distracted by a distracted-looking Archer walking through the doors. Phlox huddled in the corner of the room, privately poring over his medical scanner, and barely looked up at the captain’s entrance. Archer passed him and approached his two senior officers, who turned to him expectantly, awaiting their captain’s orders. Archer sized them up. T’Pol, already in uniform of course. The captain wondered if she ever took it off except to change into a new one. Trip, wearing sweats that looked as though they had been sitting crumpled into a ball recently. Both of them had clearly been ill: pale faces, eyes that had been put in with smutty fingers, they looked to have aged a couple of years overnight. “You guys look like hell,” Archer said. Bt he said it kindly, a concerned note in his voice. “It’s been a pretty rough thirty hours,” Trip said, truthfully enough. “I guess,” the captain commiserated. “Manson’s lot weren’t keeping anything down either I hear.” Trip nodded vaguely at this, not committing one way or the other. “So what hit us?” The captain held up a PADD. “Best we’re able to figure so far, it was a wave of supercharged ionized gases. The specs we got on this thing before the sensors quit are totally unlike anything in either database. Knocked out systems across half the ship.” Trip winced as he thought of the myriad things a gigantic wave of energized gas could do to his engines. “But that’s not the worst of it,” Archer said, handing T’Pol the PADD. “The cloud was full of highly magnetic chunks of iron-ore debris.” “The hull?” T’Pol inquired. “Looks like chocolate chip cookie dough,” Archer confirmed. “Shit,” Trip said softly, imagining the mess. “Some of these things hit us pretty hard,” the captain began, “And they’re sticking where they land. I’m going to need—” But Malcolm’s voice cut him off as he addressed the ship in his stern British voice. “All hands brace!” He barely finished the words before the ship shuddered harder than before. Each grabbed wildly for support, the captain instinctively clamping a hand around T’Pol’s arm as she fell against him. Trip managed to stay upright, clutching the biobed again, but T’Pol and the captain fell heavily to the floor. This wave was briefer than the last and the ship stilled after only a few seconds. Shaken, T’Pol pushed to her knees and offered the captain a hand up off the floor. Archer was squeezing his left hand in his right, an impatiently pained expression carving the lines in his face deeper than usual, as he rolled himself up to a sitting position. “Captain,” T’Pol inquired, “are you all right?” Archer accepted her extended hand with his right and heaved himself to his feet, vaguely making a rather old-fashionedly rude gesture with his left middle finger. Trip came closer to inspect the captain’s crooked digit, which was already turning dark blue. “Ouch,” he hissed with a sharp intake of breath. “Looks like a nasty break Cap’n.” “Yeah.” Archer kept his eyes carefully averted after taking one purposeful there-I-saw-it look. “I jammed it.” Phlox, who had seen the whole thing, trotted briskly over with the necessary items to treat the captain’s hand. His scanner reset, he passed it gently over the swelling, blackish finger. Lieutenant Reed’s clipped voice returned to hover around them. “Reed to the Captain.” T’Pol stepped over to the comm panel and spoke, her head half-bowed. “The captain has been injured. It is superficial; he is being treated. Can you tell what hit us?” “It was another ionic wave, Commander,” he confirmed. “We barely saw this one coming and now we’re blind in the dark, engines down. Hoshi says its taken out the last of our sensor arrays. No way to say if more are on their way.” “Switch to the aft auxiliary array”, T’Pol responded automatically, knowing that the delicate emergency installation would never have survived. “Hoshi’s tried them all Commander,” Malcolm said, confirming her fears almost apologetically. “Those rocks are coating the hull, and all of the external equipment’s taken quite a beating. Every sensor array was encrusted by the first wave; and now the combined magnetic field is making them impossible to use.” T’Pol digested this grim news. Malcolm spoke up again, somewhat tentatively. “I think that an inverse polarity beam, directed at our own hull, may release some of the attached debris.” T’Pol glanced at the captain who was allowing Phlox to splint his discoloured finger and listening to Malcolm‘s report. Archer nodded at her. “Prepare the beam and begin when you are ready,” T’Pol affirmed. When Reed didn’t reply right away, she enquired, “Lieutenant?” “Sorry, Commander,” Reed returned. His voice sounded as if command of the bridge was weighing heavily upon his shoulders. “Ensign Sato has asked me to remind you of the possible effects an inverse polarity beam could have on the calibration of our sensors.” As he forced himself to voice the flaw in his plan, Reed tried not to emphasize his embattled colleague’s rank and nearly succeeded. Hoshi glared silently across the bridge at him, her dark hair flying in wisps around her face. In Sickbay, T’Pol raised an eyebrow, chagrined that in her current state she hadn’t remembered that important fact herself. “Ensign Sato is quite correct,“ she stated mildly. “Direct your beam at all reachable areas of the hull and outside equipment, but refrain from sweeping the sensor arrays. It would be illogical to attempt to regain sensor control via a method that could endanger their functioning.” “Aye, sir,” Reed responded. “Reed out.” He and Hoshi exchanged a brief, reconciliatory glance across the bridge, before swiftly getting to work at their individual stations: preparing together the beam and dispersal pattern that would hopefully peel the rocky, magnetic rubbish from their hull. T’Pol returned to her three crewmates at the nearby biobed. Archer was wincing as he flexed his freshly-knit finger in its close-fitting, shiny splint. Trip looked up as she approached. “So,” he said, “that didn’t sound real good.” “No,” T’Pol agreed. The captain put his hand down and gestured at the PADD she still held. “After we get out of here, I want you to take a look at these things. The little data we have is intriguing to say the least. I’d like to hear your opinion on it when we have a little more time.” The captain was quite serious. He hadn’t yet met anyone who could beat his science officer at analysing stellar data. “Of course,” T’Pol agreed, mulling possibilities over in her mind. “The waves are likely emanating from that singularity we mapped several days ago. There was little activity at the time we passed, but it may run on a cycle similar to that of a star.” She modulated her hypothesis with a cautious voice, but the captain immediately drew a conclusion anyway. “Which means, there’ll probably be another one.” “Perhaps,” T’Pol allowed. “However, without sensors, there is no way to tell for certain. Lieutenant Reed should be able to clean at least the insides of the nacelles with his polarity beam, if that is the only nature of the engine malfunction.” She paused and looked at the two men significantly: “But someone will need to go outside to free the sensor arrays manually.” Archer looked impressed with her logic. “That’s actually exactly what I came down here for. We’ve got to get sensors cleared so that we can at least see where we are going once Trip gets the engines up. You and I have the most experience outside. This is going to be a fast job: get out, clean up, get the hell back in. And I‘m not ordering you, I‘m asking.” T’Pol looked at her commanding officer, her pulse jumping loudly at the base of her throat. “Uh, excuse me,” Trip interjected, “But the reason you’re only askin’ is ‘cause it’s a suicide mission! You two are not going outside!” “Pardon me, Commander?” Archer said, somewhat shocked at Trip’s freedom of expression. “What I mean is,” Trip amended, realising that getting himself thrown in the brig for insubordination wouldn’t help anything, “you’ve got a busted hand, Cap’n! You’re right, if anyone’s gonna make it out and back before another wave approaches, they’re gonna have to work fast. You’re needed on the bridge. Let me go; Kelby‘s got Engineering under control.” Trip fervently hoped this was true. Archer frowned to himself, looking down at his thick, sparkly splint and painfully flexing his stiff hand. “All right,” he agreed. Trip sighed with obvious relief. “You and Commander T’Pol get suited up. The sooner we start, the sooner we’re done.” “No, wait, hold on Cap’n—” Trip interrupted, but Archer stood up, continuing. “I want both of you to maintain an open comm link contact. We may not have sensors, but we can at least keep our eyes open for you. Any sign of trouble, and you turn straight back, is that understood?” “Yes, Captain,” T’Pol stated in her mellow voice, seemingly oblivious to Trip’s sputtering next to her. “Yes, Cap’n, but there’s no need for both of us to go.” Trip followed the captain as he strode toward the double doors. “Y’said it yourself, you need T’Pol to analyze these things. She should be at her station.” Archer stopped and turned to look at Trip. “T‘Pol has logged more hours in a suit than anyone. There’ll be plenty of time once were safely away to study the phenomenon. I appreciate your concern, but you’re not actually suggesting that you spacewalk without a partner are you?” “Well, no, but she’s just had the flu,” Trip tried weakly. “So’ve you,” Archer said. T’Pol didn’t say anything and was standing, arms folded, glaring at Trip. Archer looked from one to another. Something was clearly going on that he wasn’t privy to. “Is there some reason you can’t do it?” Archer asked T’Pol, a perplexed frown on his face. “No, Captain,” T’Pol replied firmly, but looking at Trip. Trip licked his lips in utter exasperation. He knew now was not the time to involve the harassed, injured captain in their own personal can of worms. T’Pol, c’mon! he tried mentally. That’s what I’m planning on doing, she replied. Neither wanted to dare let the other one out of sight. Trip tried to convince her with sheer force of angry glare, and she replied in kind. The captain carefully made sure in his mind that it wasn’t April Fools’ day. No. No, it was only February. Still six weeks to go until that horror descended. Irrelevantly, Archer shuddered at the thought of what lay in wait for him this year. Meanwhile Trip and T’Pol were still staring at one another. He couldn’t tell if they wanted to strangle one another, tear each other’s clothes off, or burst into tears. It literally and impossibly somehow looked like all three. His recently-cracked hand throbbing with every heartbeat, Archer suddenly grew weary of the ever-present giant yellow elephant always in the room whenever these two were face to face. “Crewmen,” he barked suddenly. Commanders Trip and T’Pol whipped about as though grabbed by their necks. It was simply training in military responses that did it for them: reflexively shutting their mouths, blankening their stares, and kicking their respective asses into quivering line. “Yes sir,” they both replied. “I don’t know what it is today with you two, but for the last time, keep it in your quarters. What you do on your off time is none of my business; don’t make it my business. Is that understood??” Both of his officers stared straight ahead, unflinching under his anger. “Yes, sir,” Trip replied rapidly. “Good. Now get out there, since you’re both so damn eager to clean up the hull, and don’t come back inside till you’re done.” Archer gave them a final, withering glare and then turned and exited the Sickbay via its large double doors. Upon gaining the privacy of the deserted turbolift, Archer sagged momentarily against the wall. There. Maybe that tirade would finally get through to them. He would rather not have to say anything at all, but he couldn’t very well have them carping and mooning at one another in public could he? He honestly wished that they wouldn’t keep putting him in this position, sincerely wondering why they couldn’t just make up their minds one way or the other. It was rare Archer bothered to second-guess his own decisions, trusting instinct to guide him surely past most obstacles. But he hated yelling at Trip. It always shook him up. The worst reason you shouldn’t have your best friend on your chain of command. And yelling at T’Pol was never worth what it usually end up costing him in the end. In fact, Archer reflected, yelling at T’Pol had held none of the satisfaction it often did. He realised that his usual sense of triumph stemmed only from the fact that he somehow sensed she was more than his equal in everything except experience—in which she far outstripped him. A worthy competitor. Able to take care of herself. Today, however, she had simply looked like a young woman trying not to cry. Archer pushed off the wall as the lift halted and made his way down the corridor musing how much a person could change your beliefs about them, no matter how stubborn you were. If they were willing, like T’Pol, to put in their maximum possible contribution, daily, for years if they had to. As she had done. As he had made her do. Archer felt an uncharacteristic sense of loutishness wash over him at his most recent unseemly conduct, necessary though it might have been. He made a mental note to ask T’Pol to lunch tomorrow to find out what was bothering her. * * * “How so?” T’Pol asked, fastening her own waistband and reaching for the upper half. “Going out into open space in your condition? Gee, I don’t know,” Trip replied sarcastically. “What ‘condition’ is that?” T’Pol asked, stopping in her dressing and looking at him sadly. Trip sighed, realising what she meant. “None. I guess,” he admitted. “Trip,” T’Pol said, her voice faintly earnest. “Please. I can’t just sit at my station, waiting for—.” She swallowed. “I need to be doing something.” Trip nodded, better understanding his own sudden insistence that he take the captain’s place. Sure as hell beat tinkering around in Engineering with too much space and time to think. “Are y’sure you’re gonna be okay?” Trip asked one last time, still not convinced that this was anything like a good idea. T’Pol paused before donning her atmospheric helmet. “For the last time, I’m fine.” Her voice was wearily ingenuous as she addressed him, but she echoed the captain’s phrasing exactly. Trip smiled as he looked down, chastised, at his gloves. He had often wondered if T’Pol unintentionally said the innocent-sounding things she did, or if she knew exactly which buttons she was pressing. She had lived among humans for many years. Trip could see clearly enough now: it was the latter. She had an evil streak that he had always suspected but never been able to confirm. “You’re bad,” Trip said, without explanation. He shook his head good-naturedly and he finished dressing. Once ready, they entered the small airlock without further discussion. Trip turned to the control panel to prepare to depressurise the room as T’Pol squeezed in next to him and closed the inner door. They felt their pressure suits crinkle out around arms and legs as the atmosphere in the room slowly drained away at the request of Trip‘s fingers. Finally, at equalized pressure, the outer door released and they were able to step out onto Enterprise’s dorsal surface. Malcolm had already used the wand of his inverse polarity beam to deactivate the magnetic sticking power of many of the miniature asteroids, but, like a large man trying to soap his own back, geometry had precluded many areas of the ship. Large white roads of clear hull showed starkly next to wide strips of knobbly black rind where the beam had been forced smoothly aside by either the limitations of his targeting arc or the exhortations of the communications officer. However, in the short time he’d been at it, Malcolm had managed to clear the majority of the aft half of the ship. It was the saucer section that still looked like a burned marshmallow. They had chosen an aft airlock closest to the array they planned on freeing, but there was still a sizeable chunk of hull to be crossed, and Trip and T’Pol immediately started out upon its gleaming, pockmarked sward. Electromagnetic boots *wummped* along the surface as they began shortening the distance to the array cluster fifty metres across the white plain. Trip looked all about, momentarily savouring the wonder, as he always did, of being in outer space with nothing but a thin shell of kevlarium and textilite separating him from the frigid nothingness. He turned awkwardly to look at T’Pol. She was clumping along in her smaller suit, posture erect, thoughts held disciplined and focussed upon the task ahead. Trip wondered at her endurance, drawing strength for his own sense of focus from hers. They approached the affected sensor array. Small lumps of what looked like shiny coal were packed and mounded tightly all over it and around the area that Malcolm had avoided with his beam. Trip poked at one with his boot, forgetting for a moment that the whole point was they were severely magnetic. His foot slammed against the sensor array with a loud clump. He peevishly stabbed the control that deactivated a boot’s magnet and removed his foot from the sensor, replacing it on the hull. T’Pol said nothing, but Trip could sense her silent and somewhat hysterical mirth, deep and well-contained within her ‘Vulcan’ psyche. “Yeah, yeah,” Trip dryly replied over their comm link, though he secretly loved catching such glimpses of her uncensored self. She was better at hiding things than he had thought…if this was what was always going on. “I—” “—don’t have any idea what I’m talking about,” Trip finished for her in the same ironic, Southern tone. “I know.” He passed her a small magnetic resequencer which she took awkwardly from his gloved hand and clipped to her tool belt. They met one another’s eyes briefly, and then together they each *wummped* around to opposite sides of the array and began methodically detaching the small, rounded rocks. Trip was reminded briefly of cutting grapes at Chautauqua vineyard one summer, though these ‘grapes’ were billions of years old, deadly magnetic, and ranged in size from that of a snow pea to small boulders larger than their EV helmets. The ancient pebbles had spent billions of millennia smoothing themselves upon the vast, sparse riverbed of the cosmos and seemed artificially round and knobbly-smooth to eyes that were used to sharper, younger, planetary rocks. Trip mused at the fact that this was Nature: out here among the infinite plains of the galaxy. Yet his mind tended to label such things exotic and fabulous, when really, it was the little, glittering orbs of Minshara-class planets like Vulcan and Earth that were rare and miraculous. Trees and birds and the rest. Trip appreciated violently, as he worked in the vast, silent emptiness of his universe, the crazy magic of life. Knowing such things intellectually, of course, does nothing to rewire the human brain’s silly flights of fancy; and so he also marvelled as he detached the vastly common pebbles: letting them float freely into space, deactivated, some ticking quietly against his suit or face-shield before twining off into the blackness. Dwelling on their bizarre, lumpy, too-smooth shapes, he was reminded suddenly of an old jam-jar of mercury he and Philip had found one summer in the boathouse at the lake. “I hope you’re joking,” floated across the comm. Jolted from his imaginings, Trip grinned over at T’Pol, who had been idly watching his thoughts as she worked. “Nope. We couldn’t get the lid open, but we shook it up and rolled it around. Pretty neat stuff, actually. That is, until my mom caught us. Got me more ashamed about messin’ with something I knew was scientifically dangerous than she did about me breakin’ any house rule. Asked me what kind of an engineer I’d make, flingin’ mercury all over the place.” “A highly toxic one,” T’Pol replied in her classic voice, deftly removing the black slag piece by piece. Trip laughed to himself as he cleaned off his own side of the array. Some of the stones had attached themselves with such force, they had dented or even crushed small areas of the equipment. “No wonder this beast’s offline,” Trip called across the emptiness between them, their connection suddenly somewhat staticky. “Look at the dents.” “I see them,” T’Pol confirmed patchily. “We will need to—” Her voice cut out as either her transmitter or his receiver failed. Trip wondered which of their suits’ comms was acting up and was about to try contacting Hoshi when he saw something behind T’Pol’s right shoulder. It looked like a thin white ribbon of toffee, away in the far distance, innocuous enough. But totally out of place. Trip stood up straight and let go of his resequencer. It hovered nearby, attached to him by the umbilicus of its cord. T’Pol noted his stance and twisted awkwardly on the spot to see what was behind her. It could only be another of the waves. “C’mon!” Trip shouted silently at her. He waved an arm to indicate she should follow and they slowly *wummped* across the narrow football field of the lower hull back toward the aft hatch from which they had emerged. After a moment, Trip glanced back again. T’Pol was just behind him, striding along strongly. The speeding ribbon of ionized gas and rocky debris had easily already tripled in size since they had started back. Trip could only assume that no one had called them due to the comm trouble, or maybe no one else had even seen it yet. They walked faster, trying not to look back or over-breathe their rich oxygen mix. Trip realised that their chances of getting all the way to the hatch and safely sealed into the ship were becoming slimmer. Their pace quickened yet again as they found new motivated reserves of energy. T’Pol pulled up next to him and they marched side-by-side in the unconnected quiet of radio-silent space. Only T’Pol’s own breath haunted her in the close, humid space of her otherwise-silent helmet. She tried to modulate its ragged tempo to her rapidly tiring footsteps. The magnetic boots were computer-controlled in that they sensed the wearer taking a step and modulated the magnet’s strength as their weight shifted forward and their foot came up. This did not mean, however, that the foot lifted naturally and easily away from the deck. There was still a strong magnetic resistance to be broken with each footstep, making any outing with the boots activated into a harsh quadricep workout. Trip marvelled somewhat at T’Pol’s stamina. He was sweating bullets inside his own suit, the internal humidity controls unable to keep up with his sudden change of temperature and allowing warm liquid to trickle down his legs to pool and cool in his boots. He glanced back one more time. The lethal twist of energy was looming hugely now alongside the ship in the immense, black 359° of sky that surrounded them. Too late. They had reached the level of the wide, flat nacelle struts. They would have to do. Trip grabbed T’Pol’s arm, and hauled her sideways, showing her his plan in his mind. Holding her forearm, he stabbed at the maglock control that would fuse her feet to the hull. He lifted his own forearm and did the same for himself and then gripped her thick gloves in his own as they huddled against the rearing, blank wall. Their eyes locked through the thin glass of their visors. Unable to check the progress of the wave’s approach, they waited—listening for nothing—silent in the dark. Trip watched T’Pol’s brave face through the gently fogging and clearing pane before him. She squeezed his hands through the bulky gloves, allowing him to see into her heart, and clearly mouthed the words ‘I love you’. Trip’s heart skipped a beat, but he was prevented from responding by the arrival of the wave. Trip had never been caught in a tornado, but he imagined this was as close as you could get. They clung to one another, blind in the swirling cloud of energized gas. The sheer white wall they huddled against prevented most of the solid debris from hitting them, but many smaller pieces of icy rock still spackled mercilessly against their suits. Trip prayed that the thin fabric wouldn’t rupture before the wave passed. T’Pol closed her eyes as the surge piledrove through the space Enterprise hung in. She could hear the ions screaming through the space she occupied, though her Vulcanish brain told her, even as she strained to cling to Trip’s bulk in front if her, that it was illogical to imagine her ears could sense such things. Only their magnetic boots fused them to the hull. Both of them were certain that their grinding ankle bones were separating from their calves and feet as they were whipped around like a flesh windsock, caught in a cyclonic space tempest that they were all barely to survive. And then that only due to the fact that their enveloping mother ship—the sealed cocoon that they had so foolishly left—was steadily holding fast for them a shield before the storm. Fully seven stories straight up and fifty metres wide—an unassailable white wall of sheer human will moulded into tritanium and supporting the starboard nacelle above all: the nacelle strut was the perfect thing to huddle behind, if one was caught in the centre of an ionic singularity travelling at high speed and impacting one’s ship at a relatively right angle. The only sounds perceptible to either of them other than their own gulpingly instinctive breaths were the ticks and snaps of millions of sand and cherry-sized sized pieces of ancient dust as they swirled around and over the nacelle above and rained down fiercely upon their tempered plexiglass heads. Only the pieces that connected their suits transmitted any sound, though their booted feet sensed the tremble as larger boulders smashed silently against the side of the hull. T’Pol fought to lock her knees and at least remain firmly standing as Trip kept them together with sheer force of will channelled through thoroughly numb arms. She had been holding on, but could no longer tell where her own arms were or if they had simply been torn off by the maelstrom and painlessly whirled away. For some reason, T’Pol felt strangely peaceful—as if a mind (minds?) other than her own had taken over her sentient fear and animal panic and wafted them away into the thick mist of rare molecules they bathed in. The illogical hum of energy in her ears widened outward until her head felt huge and invincible and Trip’s supporting arms became a heavy suit of armour that allowed her to stand, pillar-like before the storm, laughing as it lashed feebly against her unconquerable form. She didn’t know that she had blacked out, hanging heavily in Trip’s adrenaline fired grasp as he attempted to wait out the blender that was their magnetic foe. And she didn’t find out until much, much later that the warm, sticky fluid pooling in her boots was not perspiration, but blood. |
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