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"The Forgotten Time II: Ashaya"
Rating: R (for occasional language) Author's Note: All Vulcan words are my best try from the Vulcan Language Database. This story takes place between Kir’Shara and Daedalus —circa January 2155. Chapter 15 Conclusion “What now?” Phlox asked the universe, in extreme irritation. He was trying to aim his medical scanner at Commander Tucker, but the intractable young man wouldn’t lie still. “Archer here,” the captain responded, snuggling up and speaking to the wall. “There’s been an explosion,” Malcolm’s taut voice reported from the bridge. “We can’t tell yet if it’s internal or weapons fire. The sensors went out just a moment before.” “Get a team on it,” the captain barked. “Already done, sir,” Malcolm replied, “and we’re being hailed,” he added as Ensign Sato caught his attention and pointed to her console. “From the Sel’Tior ship.” Archer paused in surprise and glanced over at his two groggy, but conscious crewmates, both of whom were getting slowly to a sitting position, much to a fussing Phlox’s chagrin. “The Sel’Tior?” Archer repeated. “I thought they were being detained on the surface,” he said in confusion. “That’s what the Vulcans said. But there must be at least a few in orbit. Apparently, their leader wants to talk to you, and Hoshi says he’s mad as hell.” “Well, if he’s leading the Bringers of Wrath, I suppose that makes sense,” Archer muttered to himself. Bloody pretentious time-consuming murderous groups of zealots and their silly self-given names. “Patch it through to Sickbay,” he asked Malcolm, and he went over to the doctor’s computer terminal. He hit the flashing icon on the screen and an angry, antennaed visage filled the small square. “Treachery! You too shall be purged!” Archer paused, bemused, and waited as the barb of the man’s unanswered threat dulled to muted discomfort and then rage again. “WELL?” “Well what?” Archer replied rudely. “You have nothing to say in your own defence?” The man’s self-righteous rage was complete. “Understandable! Your perfidy in this matter is clear! You side with the Vulcans! You attack our ship!” “Slow down,” Archer said calmly. “We’re not siding with anyone. We’re here because of the fact that your ship attacked Vulcan. No one wants to see this degenerate into violence!” His voice escalated at the end of his sentence into a slightly grumpy yell as it always did when he was trying to stay patient. “I tell you it already has!” The other man returned. “A strange way you have of brokering peace, Captain!” he hissed. “Firing one moment and claiming innocence and brotherhood the next! We have scanned your vessels! We know you have killed our captain and have him onboard! Your weapons have destroyed our engine! You will pay for this duplicity!” As the man seethed and fumed at an increasingly-baffled captain, the image suddenly fuzzed out as if from an outside source. “Sorry,” Malcolm apologized over the comm. “I made it look like interference. But I thought you should know we’ve got sensors back online. We did fire at the Sel’Tior.” “We what?” Archer repeated incredulously. “How did that happen?” “While sensors were offline,” Malcolm clarified in a baffled voice. “Someone hotwired the weapons control to another location. We’re working to find out where and who.” His voice hardened as he thought about who. Another traitor aboard… “Keep me posted,” Archer said, realising the longer he kept the lieutenant talking the longer he kept him away from his work. “And keep up your ‘interference’ if you can…I’d hate to have to talk to that guy again until we have some kind of explanation. We do happen to have that dead body on board, and it could look kind of…” “Aye sir,” Reed replied, and his voice vanished. Archer sighed and turned from the sickbay computer screen to meet the sight of Phlox standing before his two noncompliant patients, hypospray in hand, and waving his arms in a rather baroque fashion as he entreated with them. “You simply cannot expect me to let either of you leave,” the portly doctor spluttered. “You can see the effect the meld, or bond, or whatever it was, had on Koss and T’Saru…they are dead. Now I am ordering you both to lie down. Immediately.” He waited, his eyes glittering. Archer didn’t approach, allowing the doctor autonomy within his medical bay. Trip stood upon his feet, tired but resolute, arms folded. He listened politely to the doctor’s concerns and waited while he was ordered to lie down. And then, tipping his head a little to the side (as if to indicate it was certainly nothing personal) he replied, “Respectfully, Doc, I know you’re just doing your job. And I’m sorry, but I have to go do mine. If someone’s sabotaging the ship and firing our weapons all over the place, I have to get down to Engineering.” “This will be going down in your permanent record. Direct insubordination.” Phlox’s voice was quiet and hard. He had no tolerance for crewpersons who had no respect for the lives and limbs he worked so hard and dreadfully to protect. “I understand,” Trip replied fairly. He knew that was the regulation. Nothing anyone could do about it. “And thanks for looking out for us just now,” he added, inclining his head toward Koss and T’Saru and the still-grisly scene that he had yet to deal with in any way, shape, or form. Later. T’Pol silently slipped down from her sitting position on the edge of her biobed and stood next to him. Trip looked at her. “I’m coming with you.” He opened his mouth to argue but, faced with his mate’s resolute determination to put the needs of the many before her own, realised that it was utterly pointless. The eyebrow said it all. “Fine,” he sighed. “Come on.” They both swiftly made their way toward the bay doors. “Commander T’Pol!” Phlox started doggedly, never, ever willing to give up on a patient while he or she was still alive and kicking. “Doc,” Archer said quietly, finally coming forward, as the two recently-unconscious commanders exited the medical bay. “They’ve made their decisions.” Phlox sighed, not looking at his captain. “Yes,” he affirmed, a peculiar Denobulan expression pinching his mouth. He sighed. “Before you return to the bridge, Captain, if you wouldn’t uh, mind,” he gestured to the inert form of the ancient priestess who still lay prone on the floor. Archer nodded, his stomach twisting slightly, and the to men reached down to heave the frail body up to one of the empty beds. * * * “I don’t know why you’re following me,” Trip said, tension in his voice. He could hear T’Pol’s thoughts ticking along above his own, but he couldn’t quite catch at them. No reply. Trip looked back. T’Pol was marching swiftly along behind him, her arms swinging efficiently in time with her smooth steps. “Not talkin’, hmm?” he asked. “What would you like me to talk about?” T’Pol asked quietly. “I hate it when you say that,” Trip muttered, pausing finally as they reached the turbolift. He stabbed the button with a keyed-up, irate thumb, crossed his arms and leaned back against the bulkhead in momentary respite, hoping the lift was far, far away in another galaxy and time… “I know,” T’Pol replied to his complaint, with a faint trace of amusement in her serious, low voice. He opened one eye to fix her with a baleful stare, before the lift arrived and he was forced to drag himself fully upright again. “I’m serious,” he insisted to T’Pol through a prodigious yawn, and ignoring her raised eyebrow. “I’m going to Engineering.” “And so am I,” she maintained just as staunchly, and with the added advantage of remaining yawnless. She too was tired and beaten, but her Vulcan physiology allowed her to stand up to the physical effects much more easily than her human partner. She folded her arms and regarded him coolly. “While we are under attack, I can be of much more help to Enterprise assisting you and the team in Engineering…than I can be sitting at the science station.” Her reasoning was sound, but it certainly wasn’t her only motivation. Trip had a rather vexing habit of nearly getting himself killed while she was up on the nice, quiet bridge…busily mapping and sampling away at her desk. She didn’t plan on letting him out of her sight. Not today. Trip, again leaning against his ship for support while waiting for the lift to get him to Engineering, regarded the woman before him in resignation. The eyebrow clearly would not be defeated. He didn’t bother trying any longer. The lift doors opened and T’Pol held a hand out, indicating that Trip should go first. He gave her one last withering look before heaving himself off the wall and leading the way out into the corridor for the short trip to Engineering. The wide doors parted. Mayhem enveloped them as they entered in the form of showering sparks; acrid, chemical smoke; and the shouts and bodies of their crewmates flying swiftly around the large, frenetic space. Trip paused for a long instant, taking in the scene around him, assessing the situation and judging where he was needed most. T’Pol instantly honed in on a nearly smokeless plasma fire that was melting a console eight metres to her right. The invisible chemical fumes crackled alarmingly through her sensitive nostrils, making her eyes water as she grabbed a level nine extinguisher from the emergency locker immediately beside the main doors and eliminated the fire with a series of quick, loud, white bursts from the small cylinder. Trip, having been looking up and around at the two levels of the large room, hadn’t noticed the small, intense fire as quickly as she, and his mouth held a wry look of self-reproach as T’Pol turned from her work to find him standing there. She wordlessly handed him the extinguisher, her face suggesting that they get on with the tasks ahead of them. Trip smiled at her in wordless thanks and, snapping the extinguisher back into the emerg locker, he turned. “Kelby! Report!” * * * Under the expert leadership of their newly-reappeared chief, the engineering team worked swiftly to repair and reroute the damaged systems. T’Pol accessed the senior bridge stations from a nearby console and reviewed the scans that Ensign Sato was running. The computer was trying to track down and localize which console had been used to perform the sabotage within the ship. A thrill of sudden shock lit her veins as she reviewed Hoshi’s other recent scans. A Suliban transmission. She recalled the faint thump of a dead Andorian’s boots against the shuttle she’d ridden back from Vulcan. They had loaded him onboard and sent him up to Sickbay. But was he still there? Like the pieces of a Kal-toh puzzle morphing into place, T’Pol’s mind neatly slotted together the mysterious onboard sabotage and the seemingly-dead, seemingly-Andorian corpse they’d scooped from orbit. The easily-manipulated Sel’Tior as pawns and tools of the Suliban made more than sense. Automatically following her line of thinking, her hand went to quietly hail the doctor. “Yes?” he queried a moment later, his small face appearing exhausted on the screen. “Doctor,” T’Pol said in a low, concerned voice. She hated the jumpy feeling she always got in her stomach these days when something intense was happening. She swallowed it down. “I need to you to review your scans of the deceased Andorian we picked up.” Phlox immediately began to access the relevant computer files on his end. He kept his voice bland as he spoke. He would be professional, but he was still annoyed she was in Engineering instead of in his imaging chamber. “What am I looking for?” T’Pol glanced minutely over her shoulder, illogically feeling as though something were creeping up behind her. She kept her voice as subdued as possible and continued to move her hands over the console as if she were working—so as to appear normal to anyone watching. “We need to be certain that he was not Suliban,” she clarified. “And it would be a good idea to ensure that the body is still where you left it,” she added darkly. Glancing around, she noticed Trip struggling with a power module. “Please, contact me at this station if you find anything significant,” T’Pol requested. “I will,” Phlox said. “Be careful. Phlox out.” T’Pol hurried over to assist Trip in installing the replacement power modules along the port side of the bay. “So? What’d you find out?” Trip asked, grunting as they shoved a type L component into a type E receptacle. No time to get picky about parts right now. Though he would have a word with Kelby later, about keeping things stocked up. “It’s possible we are dealing with a Suliban intruder,” T’Pol murmured as she calibrated the new installation with a hyperspanner. “Sato and Reed found a recent transmission.” “And now we have a mystery saboteur onboard,” Trip finished, just as quietly. Everyone instinctively hushed up and tried not to peek around when the Suliban were on the move. Too many times he’d had them scramble past him on the ceiling with their insideout joints only to drop, spiderlike, catlike, into his face…. Skin crawling minutely, Trip used some of his new mental mastery to slap himself out of these pointlessly stressful musings. His aching mental muscles felt loose and torn as he flexed them to do so, but he was still amazed at the latent abilities that he never knew he had. Damaged and weary though he was, he suspected that he would heal in time. “We both will,” T’Pol agreed quietly, not looking up from her work on the power conduit, but simultaneously gently squeezing out a warm washcloth over his tired, bruised, resilient human brain. Trip smiled to himself as he lifted the last heavy module into the series and crammed the latching mechanisms home. He couldn’t believe they were already back at work, but that was how it was in space. Nevertheless, eventually, sooner or later, one day the ship would have to be free enough from strife that he could fall over and sleep for fifty days or so, and then, after that, he and T’Pol would finally start their married life together. It still seemed impossible. “How should we tell them?” T’Pol asked, glancing up once at their nearby crewmates, each of whom was embroiled in some desperate, emergency-quick task. “Probably should get it over with all at once if we can,” he suggested, scanning the new power relay and setting up test diagnostics. With some trepidation, T’Pol envisioned a large crowd of emotional humans. “Perhaps,” she suggested, “we should just allow the news to spread naturally. This ship seems especially efficacious at disseminating personal information.” “We’re a bunch of blabs, you mean,” Trip paraphrased in agreement. “Yep, I don’t know why, but gossip is just about the universal favourite hobby of humans far and wide.” T’Pol didn’t disagree. The next part of their installation required someone to get under the last module to calibrate some inconveniently located components. T’Pol slid her torso beneath without comment, not wanting Trip to overstress his calf, which was still healing from the burns he’d received. He passed her tools and continued to consider their options. “So, yeah, we could go the grapevine route,“ he said, saving time by explaining the grapevine reference mentally as he spoke. “But, I don’t think y’understand what we’re in for here. Among a species that loves gossip, the hands-down top two favourite subjects of discussion are babies and marriage, in that order.” T’Pol didn’t answer aloud, merely holding out her hand for the flux coupler. But Trip could feel her misgivings turning to faint foreboding as she illogically anticipated possible scenarios she could become entrapped within. Unfortunately, he would be doing her no favours if he failed to prepare her for the reality that awaited them. He continued to outline the situation mercilessly. “There’re going to be squeals and hugs. Mostly from girls, mostly for you. But by no means all on either count,” he added darkly, thinking of Travis and others. “Best to get it over with all at once, otherwise it goes on for two weeks. Just human nature.” T’Pol’s skin crept slightly at the thought of dozens of squealing human hugs. But, gathering her resolve, she took a deep breath and firmly resigned herself to the inevitable. If it was human custom, she would do it. She would do it for Trip. Trip laughed out loud at her courage and stoicism. This prompted an odd look from Kelby who was passing at that moment. Certainly Commander T’Pol, working on her back to finish calibrating the last of the power installations, wasn’t cracking any jokes. Kelby forgot about it as he passed on and hurried over to prime the warp intermix in preparation for re-establishing the field. Suddenly, a klaxon split the air and heads whipped to look up at the coolant duct, which had sprung a large leak and was now shooting lethal chemical gas into the fragile bubble of living space that was the interior of the Enterprise. The sound of the super cooled matter hitting the warm air of Engineering at 500 kPa was ear-splitting enough to nearly drown out the wail of the warning siren. Yet somehow, Trip raised his voice above both, and shouted to evacuate his staff. Roughly grabbing unwilling, loyal people left and right, he hurled them out the large doors like so many sacks of grain. Two or three, including Kelby, tried to push past their milling colleagues and get back in, but Trip grabbed a phaser out of one of the doorside defence modules Malcolm had recently installed. He ensured it was set to light stun and then pointed it at the group in general. “Stay back guys! Get out of the way!” The orders were barked, but neutral in pitch. He wasn’t angry with them for trying. He was warmed by their temerity, in fact. But he didn’t have time for theatrics. The last thing he needed was to also have to worry about dragging a bunch of unconscious heroic bodies back to safety. And if he didn’t get this fixed in about three seconds, they were all going to be dead anyhow. As soon as the last finger and foot had cleared the door track, it shut and he locked it. He hadn’t bothered trying to shove T’Pol out the door, as he knew she’d have simply clawed her way back in, the stubborn old thing. I am not old, she flung at him as they strapped oxygen masks over their faces and raced toward the rapidly fogging, chilly area underneath the exploding cloud and affected piping. Older’n I am, Trip riposted, ignoring the shouts of pain from his burned calf and throwing himself under the console nearest the leak (which thankfully was on the second level, and thus several metres above their heads). Without ceremony, he started to remove the computer components that would allow him to do a manual reroute of the active coolant. It was a hideously dangerous plan to be sure, but they didn’t have much choice. For once, T’Pol didn’t argue about his space cowboy tactics. She rapidly set up the computer to accept the new coolant routing and when she was ready, she looked over at him. For a brief instant, they stared at one another—eyes frightened above the clutter of their face masks—and then Trip crammed the last of the new series of relays into place. The ship shuddered violently as fifty thousand litres of supercooled liquid gas changed direction without warning. The new power relays he and T’Pol had just laboured so intensely over the last half hour to install overloaded in a violent domino zip of noisy sparks. Two small explosions took out the space beneath a console just five metres to Trip’s right and he scooted out of the confined area faster than he’d ever moved before, burned leg or no—just in time to avoid the backdraft of black smoke and heat that roiled past. Running on adrenaline alone, Trip stood up shakily, and he and T’Pol looked up and all around. The ship was still clearing its throat; aftershocks trembled nearly imperceptibly through the thick metal plating beneath their feet. But all seemed to be slowly calming. They unstrapped their face masks as the air was purified and walked the few steps to stand beneath the damaged coolant conduit. An amorphous, blobby hole had somehow formed in the reinforced tritanium alloy piping. “That looks like it melted,” Trip said in awe. Eerie, snapping crackling noises filled the now quiet engineering space as various different alloys and polymers contracted with temperature. Frost encrusted the areas contacted with the frigid gas. T’Pol’s console beeped. She left Trip looking up at the particles of snow and ice chips clattering crackily to the decking and answered. Not too surprisingly, Phlox didn’t have anything to offer for her illogical, intuitive guess that the Andorian wasn’t what he seemed to be. “I checked the stasis unit as well,” Phlox added. “He is still very much in there and still very much deceased.” His face seemed sympathetic on the small screen. T’Pol blinked into the mid-distance for a moment, before nodding. “Thank you doctor,” and she nearly cut the transmission, but a look of pure horror had crossed Phlox’s face, and she stayed her hand. “Listen carefully, Commander,” Phlox said quietly and tersely. “Drop to the floor and roll to the left.” Her brain instantly calculating that Phlox would not say such a thing unless he meant it, she obeyed with lightning reflexes: dropping promptly to the deckplating and rolling away to the left to come up with her face at the ready. What looked like a long sack was in the process of dropping from the ceiling like a dollop of honey. The instant it contacted the floor, it swooped upward and outward and turned into a man. A rice-pilaf face and slitted mouth underlined genetically altered glinting eyeballs. In the same instant, Trip turned, having heard nothing of the nearly silent interaction. His eyes were last to follow his neck and face as he still scrutinized the damaged piping five metres up. “Y’know what it reminds me of, is—” Trip froze at the scene before him, his thumb still pointing back over his shoulder. T’Pol crouched catlike upon the decking, facing a foe whose back was to Trip. The man turned his head to look at him: far, far too far for a normal neck. Suliban. Trip’s hand swung up from his side, grabbing the phaser he’d taken earlier in one smooth motion. And the instant it was aimed, he fired. He knew it was pointless, as he’d made sure that it was barely on stun a few minutes back when he’d pointed it at his own people to force them back into the corridor. Suliban didn’t stun too well even on high power, as he recalled. However, mulishly, he kept the blast going. Vessik laughed once and then stared at the human man in total scorn tinged with uncertainty. Trip continued to beam his phaser straight into the other’s middle. “Fool!” the Suliban spat, trying unsuccessfully to resist an urge to swipe at the beam in order to brush it away. “That’s me,” Trip muttered, keeping it up. At this pace, the power cell would last three days. T’Pol slid away unnoticed. “Stop it!” Vessik finally shouted, and the indignity of the scene caught in his throat and he lunged. Wrapping weird hands around Trip’s trachea, he prepared to snuff out the small, irritating life impeding his vital mission to incite war and destabilize the quadrant. “Turn around,” was the only thing Trip managed to gasp before his airway was completely closed. Continuing to throttle Trip, Vessik did so, a mere 20° head-turn to the left. It gave him enough of a view to see that the Vulcan bitch was behind him with a large phase rifle. Flinging the human suddenly down, he spun to whack the weapon out of her hands. But, too quick for him, she fired one sharp burst from Malcolm’s latest prototype rifle. The shot went into him like he was made of putty. He froze, glaring at T’Pol with his mutated eyes, hissing with his unhappy mouth, until the explosive power of the energy his augmented body had impressively absorbed and tried to contain crackled up and through his skin like magma beneath a parched plain—and he melted down like a cast-iron wicked witch. Once formed into a smallish ball on the decking, the molten mass that had been Vessik melted straight through and out into the frigid, 2.7 degrees Kelvin blackness of space beyond. Force fields fuzzed instantly into place to hold back the atmosphere from the hole he’d made in the outer skin of the starship, but the hull breach still sounded like an explosion. Trip and then T’Pol eased toward the half-metre wide hole in the decking and peered down. Velvety space and cold, sparked starlight were visible through the tunnel of destruction Vessik had made burning his way out. “The melting point of that alloy is 5170 degrees Celsius,” T’Pol observed. “Y’don’t have to tell me,” Trip said, still awed at the hole in his decking. “Y’think he’s still alive out there?” “I wouldn’t think so,” T’Pol said. She looked up at Trip with serious, anxious eyes. “But we’ve underestimated the Suliban before.” They turned from the twisted wound in the ship and took a few steps toward the door. Trip stopped and cleared his throat a few times, swallowing and twisting his head from side to side. “Man, that guy really did a number on my shoulder here,” he said, trying in vain to grapple at the strained area with an equally stiff arm. T’Pol stopped his flailing with one hand and gently pinched a point on his collarbone with the other. The pain instantly dulled to a quiet ache. “Thanks,” Trip said with some surprise and relief. “Let’s go home,” T’Pol said. “That sounds wonderful,” Trip replied. And what option did he have at this point but to kiss her? And so of course that was the moment Captain Archer chose to release the lockout on the main Engineering doors from the bridge. Refusing to be startled, neither of them jumped as the doors slid open, but merely finished their kiss and looked up at the small crowd of techs and engineers framed by the large open doors. Trip took her hand and the two of them quietly walked around and past the staring crew, avoiding any direct eye contact, and Trip making general polite ‘out-of-my-way’ noises. Hi. ‘Scuse me. How y’doin’? And so forth. Until they finally got past them and rounded the first bend in the corridor. “D’you think they saw us?” T’Pol asked with false gravity. Trip, totally overwrought by the events of god-knew-how-many-hours-it-had-been-now, burst into nearly hysterical laughter that got worse when he saw her smile a little bit…which was, for her, as good as falling on the ground. He put an arm around her and kissed the side of her head as they walked, still wiping his eyes, and they soon found themselves in front of her quarters. T’Pol led the way in and activated the lights. It appeared as it always did, the things within it so familiar now that they, illogically, seemed to be a part of her. However, meaningful though her possessions were to her, they still amounted to few enough. It made it easy for her to tuck all of her things into the one valise and Starfleet issue backpack she had in her closet. She lofted the pack to her back, and Trip picked up the case. “Would you mind carrying this also?” T’Pol asked, handing him one of the two large leather pillows she had. He took it. She looked around one last time at what had been her little den for the last four years. A hideaway, really, if she was honest with herself. She would miss it, but like an old security blanket, it was a thing probably best detached from. She wondered what it would be like—the two of them living in that one small space. Interesting times were ahead, that was for certain. “You sure about this?” Trip asked, still not able to be certain of her emotional state with his mind so recently buffeted. T’Pol nodded without turning, as she looked out the window at the stars. “I was lonely here,” she confessed. “And sad.” She looked up at Trip who had joined her. “I just didn’t know what to call it.” They spent a few moments watching the stars, and then she added, “I spent an illogical amount of time hoping you would stop by.” “That’s funny,” Trip remarked. “I spent an illogical amount of time wishing you wanted me to come over.” “A most frustrating situation,” T’Pol agreed. “However, now that we have solved that problem by cohabitation, I expect we’ll have fewer misunderstandings.” “Or at least we’ll be closer so we can have the misunderstandings more efficiently,” Trip said naughtily. “And make up more efficiently afterwards,” she added blandly, leading the way out into the corridor. The promise implied in her statement would have been quite thrilling and lovely, except that he was so tired by now, that the prospect of being able to pass out in a few more minutes was uncompromisingly alluring. Nothing—not even sexy Vulcans—was going to stop him from sleeping until he could sleep no more. He felt like falling down right here on the floor and sleeping in the corridor on this nice comfy leather pillow of T’Pol’s that they always used during neuropressure. Something odd struck him. “Say, T’Pol,” he queried, “How come you have leather pillows if you’re all vegetarian and whatnot?” She seemed to consider the question carefully as they walked along, and then replied, “Well, it wouldn’t count if the animal was already killed for ceremonial or food purposes. In those cases it would be illogical to allow the hide to go to waste.” “What’re you talking about, ‘wouldn‘t count’?” Trip started, gleefully taking the bait. There was nothing he loved better than a nice debate over some random ethical point with no real answers. Disputes like that with T’Pol were the bread and butter of his existence, and she knew it. They bickered over the salient points of vegetarianism all the way down the hall and on the short lift trip to their new communal living space. Finally, once outside Trip’s front door, they paused for a moment so that he could change the security index. Rather ceremonially he took her thumb and pressed it against the pad to register her print. They looked at one another. “I still say it’s pretty clear, vegetarians and leather pillows just don’t seem to go together,” he continued, as if they hadn‘t stopped. “In any case, it’s a moot point,” she finally said, with the air of one calmly laying her flush down upon the cloth. “How is it ‘moot’?” Trip asked, finally pressing the door-open button. “These particular pillows happen to be made of synthetic suede,” she said innocently, and leading the way with calf eyes, she entered her new home. “Oh, so it’s gonna be like that, huh?” Trip demanded, following and trying not to laugh, thinking of the last three minutes of pointless devil’s advocation. T’Pol had stopped in front of the window without activating the lights. She dropped her bag and looked into the glittering depths of space in which they all hung, fragile as soap bubbles in the sunlight. Trip set his burden down and came over to share the view of endless inky blackness pricked with countless pinpoint bits of glittering light. “View’s almost as good anyway,” Trip said. Unable to resist the siren call of his soft, soft mattress any longer, he pulled at T’Pol’s waist and led her to the bed as enthusiastically as if he’d been of a mind to immediately consummate their new living arrangement. However, neither was of a mind to do anything of the sort at the moment, and they just crawled onto Trip’s comfortable, ten-centimetres-wider bed and curled up in a communal fetal ball under the blanket. “We’re home,” Trip said sleepily into the darkness with some surprise. He somehow hadn’t actually believed they’d pull it off. “I haven’t been home in a long time,” T’Pol mumbled just as sleepily, after a moment, even though she’d just arrived back from Vulcan. “Me neither,” Trip agreed, yawning and pushing his face into his pillow. He nearly slipped under, but a thought roused him slightly, and he swished around on the wall for the intercom button. Finally locating it, he hailed Sickbay. “Phlox here,” came the prompt reply. “Phlox, it’s Trip, jus’ lettin’ you know we’re going to sleep for sixty or so hours. Don’t bug us. ‘Night.” The last of his statement was a bit louder than the beginning, in that it had to overcome the spluttering commencement of fresh orders from the good doctor. Trip cut him off with a push of a button and addressed the invisible, hovering presence of the ship’s computer. “Computer, no calls or doorbells from anyone except the Captain…got it?” The computer made affirmative noises and Trip finally turned over and promptly fell asleep for the greatest nap of his entire life.
“When you consider the fact that we don’t know how much time we also spent assisting crewman Daniels in some alternate universe, the past few weeks have certainly been somewhat…eventful.” T’Pol spoke as easily now of time travel and alternate universes as she would of starmaps and mint tea. She bent and rummaged in the closet for her shoes. “Somewhat,” Trip agreed readily. He rubbed his face. A few weeks? It felt like two years and a handful of months to boot. “But,” he said with pride, “Proved what?” “That you and I make a hell of a team,” Trip finished, smiling up at her. “We do seem to work well together,” she allowed, standing on one leg at a time to slip her shoes on. Even more now that we’re in each others heads, he added mischievously. He was seated crosslegged on the bed, leaning against the bulkhead in his civvies, reading. Phlox had given them both an enforced medical leave of ten days. He had actually written the orders down and included language to the effect that if he saw either of them in uniform before the twelfth, they would be reported to Starfleet Command for insubordination. Not wishing to push their luck, both had meekly bowed to the doctor’s indomitable therapeutic will, and Trip was dragging out clothes from his closet that he hadn’t seen in years. Today’s was dark pants and a voluminous white shirt that he was pretty sure he stole from some guy on the Starfleet Academy rugby team. T’Pol had just put on something he hadn’t seen before, a non-revealing cream-coloured flowing pants and tunic outfit that was irreproachably professional and classy, but somehow sexy as all get out. She walked past in her shoes, all efficiency to his laconic calm. They were in a bit of a hurry, he admitted to himself, but they were hardly going to start dinner without them. And besides, Malcolm hadn’t even stopped by yet. T’Pol paused in front of him. “If you do not get ready soon, you may be late,” she observed calmly, but clearly hinting that she didn’t plan on lateness, whatever else happened. “I am ready,” Trip said, innocently reading. He practiced the fine and difficult art of not thinking about something, without accidentally thinking about it in the process. “You’re wearing that.” It was a statement. “What’s wrong with this?” Trip protested, plucking vaguely at his shirt and scrolling through his book. The devil had more than one advocate working on his legal team. “You’ve dribbled jam on it,” T’Pol said with the air of one relaying delicate, unpleasant news. “And besides, it’s too puffy. You look like a pirate.” The door chime sounded. Trip looked up from his book thoughtfully. “Orion or human?” he asked. “Does it matter?” T’Pol tossed over her shoulder in exasperation, as she went to answer the door. “Ahhh, I guess not,” Trip gave in tossing his PADD aside, and he went to the closet to get his real shirt. Meanwhile, T’Pol admitted Malcolm and Hoshi into the small room. At the sight of Trip’s rummaging back in the closet corner, Hoshi sighed in irritation. “He’s not ready yet?” “I can’t do a thing with him,” T’Pol observed blandly, giving the other two a start. They weren’t yet used to T’Pol’s suddenly-slightly-altered psyche. She wondered if it was her or Trip’s perverse nature that made her enjoy seeing them all faintly off-balance over it. Trip emerged victorious, gripping his dress shirt. “God, he’s not wearing that awful thing, is he?” Malcolm asked of the shirt Trip already had on. “That’s the one you pinched right? From your Academy mate?” “I said maybe I pinched it,” Trip clarified, “I can’t remember. And anyway—” “You look like a bloody pirate!” Hoshi tried unsuccessfully not to shriek with suppressed laughter at this scandalized remark from the munitions officer. “I SAID: and ANYway, I’m not WEARing this one!” Trip nearly shouted, violently disrobing from the waist up and cramming the other shirt, a perfectly respectable dark brown silk one, on in its place. “Oh, well that’s all right then,” Malcolm sniffed with disdainful approval. “Are ya sure, now?” Trip asked ironically. “I want y’to be sure.” “Everybody looks fine,” Hoshi said through her teeth and chivvying eight ensigns worth of officers before her out of the Tuckers’ quarters (she figured she could safely begin to call them that now) and into the corridor. Thirty metres away from the shuttle bay doors, Trip stopped short. “I, uh, just forgot something,” he said suddenly. “I’ll be right back.” Several irritated sighs were emitted along with muttered threats and epithets, mainly from Malcolm. But, undaunted, Trip turned and jogged the short distance back to the turn they’d just taken and rounded the corner. Cleverly grabbing the turbolift and taking it one floor up, he ran past their position and took it one floor down again to the production shop adjacent to Engineering. He hated to leave it to the last second, but what other option did he have? He hadn’t had the chance to do this any other time over the last few days without risking a court-martial. Phlox had specifically prohibited him to be within fifty metres of Engineering, barring any total emergencies that absolutely required his presence. Well, this was one of them. Quickly striding to the combination matter-resequencer/cnc-machine, he awakened it out of standby, and started to punch his request swiftly into the computer. As he was refining the design, another similar one popped up helpfully from its memory stores. Ah, dammit, someone had done it already. His sense of creativity was dashed somewhat at the thought that what he assumed was his original design having been sitting on his server all along. Frantically, he used the pattern anyway, figuring it hadn’t lost all that much cache simply having one or two others like it out there. And as long as the double didn’t belong to Amanda Cole or anyone like that, he’d probably be in the clear. He speedily changed one or two things about the design and activated the sequence. He was lifting it from that movie to begin with of course. Nothing original about imitating films. Look at those Star Trek nuts. Or Star Wars. Or whatever they had called it. Course nothing topped the 2103 endomagnetry neck-jewel craze following the release of Shyamalan the III’s thriller Doornail Realm: The Eleventh Coming. What a litigious fiasco that was. Useless movie trivia chattered through Trip’s head as he impatiently waited for the noisy machine to finish laser cutting and then acid-etching the metal. Finally it was finished. Overriding the cooldown phase, Trip popped the small object gingerly into his hands, and, blowing and tossing it frantically for one moment from one fingertip to another, he managed to finesse it into his pocket with only several first degree burns. Poking his head out into the corridor, Trip slipped out of the production shop and took off down the corridor to the lift. * * * T’Pol frowned slightly and looked up from the PADD she was reading as Trip slid breathlessly into his seat on board the shuttle and they finally got underway. Trip eyed her slightly and tried not to think about anything at all. This got her attention and she glanced strangely at him. “I smell something burning,” she said. She leaned in slightly. “It smells like your shirt.” Trip pulled out the breast pocket of his shirt, but the ring had cooled now to just only very hot, and was no longer threatening to melt the silk. He glanced up. “No, it’s okay.” He turned and looked out the window as if suddenly very interested in astronomy. T’Pol frowned even more slightly at the odd fact of his finding reassurance in his breast pocket in that fashion, and seemed about to ask another question. But then, for some reason, he detected that she had her own reasons to keep quiet, and he felt her gently and casually tugging a sheet down over certain notions and thoughts she was not thinking about and hiding back here behind—. Trip stopped himself and busily looked out at the rising planetscape below. If he poked around too assiduously within her psyche, she would surely see into his own brain with her eagle eye and find out everything he was keeping bottled up in there…and they were almost at their destination. As Hoshi and Malcolm watched their odd crewmates seemingly ignoring one another on the small bench across the shuttle, they each came to the separate conclusion that though they were happy for their two friends, they certainly were one of the odder couples they’d come across in life. The dinner, though arranged and served by Vulcans, was a sumptuous one, and the event was held at a tavern of sorts near the Earth embassy. The establishment was over 800 years old, though none the less grand and austere for its great age. Speeches and ceremonial there were aplenty, even though the affair didn’t take place on official ground. The recently-mended peace and the diplomatic intervention of the Enterprise was cause for celebration. After a while, Captain Archer proposed a toast to Trip and T’Pol, and thanked them for risking their lives to halt the coolant leak and expose the Suliban saboteur. Everyone raised their glasses to the couple and drank. Trip looked over once at T’Pol and squeezed her hand before standing up. “Um, thank you, Captain. We wouldn’t have done it for anyone else but you guys,” Trip replied lifting his own drink in return. Archer smiled at him and nodded. Trip looked around. There would never be a better time. He cleared his throat. It was still scratchy from where that darn Suliban had tried to crush it. “I think, that, uh, while I have your attention, I’m going to hijack this event a little bit, for just a minute, if you don’t mind.” He was using politeness to buy time and to gather steam, and now it was nice and polite and steamy and he realised he better hurry up and say something else, or it would just sound weird. “Well, we’ve been talking, and we’re having trouble deciding on the appropriate time and place for this, so I, uh,” Trip paused at the look in T’Pol’s eyes. He hoped that he wasn’t in big trouble. He couldn’t tell. His brain felt like it had been scooped out. “I, uh, I thought I’d just take matters into my own hands.” He glanced out at his audience and happened to meet the eyes of an extremely approving Hoshi who had her hands to her mouth and an impudent anticipatory smile in her eyes. At least she clearly knew what was going on. How did she always know? The rest of his colleagues were frozen in time, as if Daniels had shown up with his pause button or something. Trip ignored them (in case he had), and he went down on one knee before T’Pol, who was simply sitting in her chair, as poised as you please. Trip took her hands in his and looked up at her. Up close he could see her outward calm quivered a little and she glanced at her staring, open-mouthed colleagues minutely out of the corner of her eye. This was what he had been so cagey about in the shuttle, she silently realised. Well, he was in for a surprise. She met his gaze levelly. Trip glanced once more at his large audience, and though this was really little more than a formality, he for some reason felt nervous. He cleared his throat again. “Captain Archer introduced us four years ago. And that first meeting was…less than promising.” At his own table, Archer smiled down at his hands, remembering the day he’d introduced his hostile best friend to the ship’s cool Vulcan observer. Trip continued simply. “But in the short time since then, you’ve become my best friend.” He paused, his throat tightening as he looked at T’Pol and thought about their many ups and downs and how grateful he was that he was here, on Vulcan, already bonded to her, and asking her to marry him before all their friends. Her own emotions mixing instinctively with his, T’Pol tried not to allow the tear beading in her left eye to overflow—and failed. She wiped the drop away reflexively, barely noticing it, but sending at least thirty-seven percent of the female humans present (and four percent of the males) into instant, silent sniffles at the unusual sight of their emotionally-affected Vulcan colleague. Trip’s strained voice roughened a little as he finished up. “We’ve already been through a lot of crazy times together, T’Pol, and I want to spend the rest of my life going through more of them with you.” He reached into his breast pocket and produced a simple, thick, shiny gold band. It was still warm to the touch. The inside was inscribed with a line in flowing Vulcan script, and it was fashioned after his favourite twenty-first century film about one particularly powerful ring that could bring species together or cleave them apart again. It was to be a reminder for them both. And it looked wickedly cool, too. Trip held this ring up now, and looked into T’Pol’s eyes in the ancient human way. He could see her pulse jumping at the base of her pale throat. “T’Pol, daughter of T’Les, will you marry me?” T’Pol blinked at him for a second, aware of the presence of expectant human tension in the room as a tangible thing—one that would have sent her sixty-one-year-old self running for the nearest meditation lamp. Finally she took a deep breath and opened her mouth to respond. She spoke quietly, but the silence was such that one could hear one’s own heart beating in one’s ears, and her logical, low voice carried to every person in the room. “We are already married.” Trip blanched microscopically at her lack of an immediate positive response and he licked his lips, trying not to sweat. “I know, but we never had a proper wedding.” The audience looked to her. “Yes we did,” T’Pol reminded him. “How else could we be married?” “Well, okay, yeah, but not a proper human one, I meant. For these guys.” Trip jerked his head toward the raptly watching crew. “And anyway, the man is supposed to propose, and I never really got to.” “The man?” queried T’Pol. The witnesses to this exchange shifted their faces simultaneously back and forth between the two amorous interlocutors, as if at a particularly engaging water-polo match. “What if the woman wants to propose?” “Well, fine, I guess,” Trip replied somewhat testily now, “but SOMEone has to, and we’re still missing that part, so d’y’mind?” “Only if you don’t,” T’Pol deadpanned, to Trip‘s utter perplexity. “I had been waiting for a more…private…setting, but as you humans are so fond of saying… ‘what the hell?‘” She spoke the colloquialism delicately and with impassive irony as she gracefully slid from her seat and lit upon both her knees before a mystified Trip. And, reaching into a miniscule pocket at her hip, she extracted something that was small and glittered in the dim restaurant lighting. “Trip Tucker the Third,” she intoned with all seriousness, “will you marry me?” Trip stared in total dumbfounded amazement, as she held out a near-duplicate of the ring he had had made for her. It was larger, and of silvery platinum, but the style was exactly the same, right down to the font of the flowing text scripting around the inside of the band. He took it and read the tiny English writing as it flickered in the candlelight. The tails of the g’s and y’s swooped deeply and to the left. For my ashaya—a human man who taught a Vulcan to love. Fighting his own tears, nodding at the obvious realisation of who had made the other ring in the database, Trip slipped it on over his left fourth finger, and then he placed the golden one he’d made for her on her own left hand. They clutched their four hands together, staring into one another’s eyes, their minds finally free to clasp gladly again now that their mutual secret had been fulfilled. “Yes,” Trip replied rather unnecessarily, and he put his hand around the back of her neck and pulled her in for a quick kiss. She allowed him three seconds for his public display of human physical affection and then she broke the kiss. They got to their feet holding hands and looked at the silent, thunderstruck crowd. “I don’t know why everyone looks so shocked,” T’Pol observed to her husband/fiancé as she took in the pale coins of dozens of staring human faces. “I thought it was hardly a well-concealed secret.” This unexpected, uncharacteristic, and frank observation from their pokerfaced Vulcan colleague was the last straw for the silently semi-hysterical observers, and it had the effect of breaking their hush into a million laughing, clapping pieces. The next five minutes were a whirl of good wishes and back-slapping and shouted bawdy jests and pool-participants clamouring for Hoshi’s official statement on the status of the betting that had been raging intermittently since the famed neuropressure sessions had commenced. Seemed you just couldn’t walk around in fatigues on a closed starship, and visit one another’s quarters for intimate physical therapy anymore, without loose, speculative lips flapping all over town. T’Pol ‘appreciated’ this wry thought of Trip’s as he formed it—her version of laughter, and twice as intense, if he peeked past the mental curtain behind which she did it. Witnessing this notion of his with false indignance, T’Pol was prevented from smacking Trip’s metaphorical wrist as he tickled metaphorical ribs, by the sudden, explosive arrival of Hoshi. She flung her arms around first Trip and then T’Pol in boisterous, three-person hug of good-natured human approval. “I knew it!” Hoshi squealed past T’Pol’s sensitive ear in the now-noisy restaurant. She pulled back, and looking with frank affection at the greenish-flushed cheeks of her only female bridge-mate, told Trip, “I knew it back in Christmas of ‘51 when she gave you that Shakespeare for Secret Santa!” She punched T’Pol lightly in the shoulder. “That was you?” Trip asked his still-embraced mate in surprise. He had never been able to figure who’d pulled his name and given him the strange little book of sonnets. Hoshi grinned and released T’Pol from the bear hug. As she replied, T’Pol tried her best to maintain a thoroughly Vulcan tone, even though Ensign Sato’s forthright display of camaraderie had thrown her more than somewhat. “I fail to see the logic in revealing the originator of a ‘secret’ Santa gift. However, since it has been some years since that particular exchange ceremony, I will admit the truth: it was I.” “Say,” Trip suddenly demanded, “you weren’t the one who gave me that rigged Rubik’s Cube last year, were you?” Ensign Sato leaned in. “Probably. She trades for your name every year.” And with this, and an evil wink, she was gone, vanished into the crowd. “Is that true?” Trip asked with a sudden pleased grin. T’Pol held out for two pointless seconds, and realising that he’d look anyhow if she refused to say, she replied with dignity: “Perhaps. However the puzzle is not rigged. You simply have been unable to solve it. It requires the use of a consistent progression of logical algorithmic adjustments. Every time I checked its progress in your quarters, it seemed you were attacking it haphazardly. With 4.3×1019 possible cube positions, the odds of a successful series of moves based on random selection are…somewhat microscopic.” “Maybe we’ll just have to sit down tonight and you can show me how it works,” he whispered into her ear, his arm still around her waist, implying all sorts of non-Rubik’s-related things. “Can I talk to you guys for a sec?” someone asked, coming up behind them in the busy room, and propelling them via their elbows toward a quietish corner. Trip turned his head to see who they were walking with and nearly bit his tongue. “No. NO WAY,” he started as they reached the corner and he turned. “We’re not doing it Daniels,” he said firmly, “so you can just forget about it.” “Relax,” Daniels laughed. “Relax, Trip: it’s okay. I’m just here to give you two your present.” “Oh. Well, all right then,” Trip allowed. Across the room, Travis was standing up tall and holding a glass aloft while he addressed the loosening crowd. Daniels produced a small, ornate wooden box and presented it to T’Pol. She snapped the catch and opened it to reveal a strange dark grey glass chronometer showing the date and time on Vulcan, Earth, and several other places. Trip looked up into Daniels’ face. “Wow, thanks,” he said sincerely. He wondered not for the first time how well Daniels knew them in other timelines. Clearly better than they knew Daniels. He was pretty sure the guy was used to that though, and didn’t feel bad. “You know,” Daniels said, looking at T’Pol with elevated respect. “You were pretty tricky to come up with that marriage bond to interfere with the memory wipe. We actually didn’t catch it until fixing it would have been way more work than leaving it. And actually this timeline is turning out better than we could have hoped. In many other universes, the Enterprise is destroyed by the conflict.” “You gave us no choice,” T’Pol said neutrally. “Uh, were you going to let us know that odds were good we were likely to be destroyed?” Trip asked. He glanced at Daniels, and then answered his own question. “No.” “Nope. That’s the hardest part of the job,” Daniels agreed. “Our ‘Prime Directive’ if you like. Wait, what year is this? Never mind. Anyhow there are literally infinite possibilities out there. Not all of them good. There’s a universe out there in which I strangle you at this very party.” “Is it this one?” Trip asked. “No,” Daniels reassured him. “Oh, good, cause my neck’s not doing so hot these days,” Trip said. He gently plucked the chronometer from its nest within the open box T’Pol still held and hefted it in his hand. It felt exactly like heavy glass, and was about the size of a baseball, but irregular and blobby in shape. “Don’t lose it, eh?” Daniels advised. “Not exactly all regulation parts. And don’t try to take it apart either,” he added as he tapped a few buttons on his wrist device. “Are you going back to work?” T’Pol enquired as Trip gently replaced the chronometer in its box and she shut the lid. Daniels smiled tiredly. “The changes are still settling into the timeline, and there are many issues that need to be addressed. “Micro-incursions, eh?” Trip asked astutely. “You know it,” Daniels said. “And actually a few more things. I won’t spoil the surprise. Here Travis’ voice floated over clearly: “I’m a pretty quiet guy. But I’ll not back down from a challenge!” And he broke into a bad rendition of an old Earth ballad about long roads and long times and the winds of change, and there were shouts of horror and laughter from the watching crowd. “God,” Trip muttered, “someone take away the mike!” “He’s not using a mike,” T’Pol observed interestedly. “Well, I’m going to have to go deal with this,” Trip said to Daniels and he stuck out his hand. Daniels shook it and nodded to T’Pol and vanished without further ado. The two remaining turned and looked out over the boisterous heads of their colleagues. “I think it’s that Russell Watson song he always does on karaoke night,” T’Pol said thoughtfully. “But it is difficult to tell. The a cappella version leaves somewhat more than usual to be desired.” “Somewhat,” Trip agreed. And then he registered what she‘d said. “You come to karaoke night? When?” “I stay in the back,” she clarified calmly, sipping her water and watching three strong crewmen from maintenance picking up the still-singing Travis and bearing him away outside. “I’ve never seen you there,” Trip replied disbelievingly. “I’ve seen you,” T’Pol mentioned innocently. “You have not,” Trip maintained. “Mack the Knife?” she suggested delicately and wandered away back towards the party. “It’s Hoshi’s fault!” he spluttered after her. “She’s a darer!” T’Pol tried, mostly successfully, to iron the smile from her face as she sipped her drink and rejoined her chatting crew.
(And it only took me 884 days. Whew! Love you guys! ~eScribe) |
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