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Postcards from Deep Space One

Disclaimer: Enterprise doesn’t belong to me, I make no money from writing this, more’s the pity. If I did own it then I wouldn’t have cancelled it after only four series.

Rating: 15

Genre: Romance/Angst

Archive: yes, just ask first.

Spoilers: These Are the Voyages

Pairing: T/T'P

Summary: Trip and T'Pol have trouble communicating, Commander Reed takes a busman's holiday and a new alien race pick DS1 as the place to sign their treaty with the Federation.

AN: This is the sequel to Desert Rose and A Thousand Years.

****

Trip woke up well before his alarm went off. As usual at this time in the morning, the quarters that he shared with T’Pol were dark, only starlight streamed through the windows. The space beside him in the bed where T’Pol should have been was empty and cold. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and groggily sat up. He felt more tired than when he’d gone to sleep, but he prised his eyes open and looked across their quarters, searching the dark for his t’hy’la. T’Pol stood staring out of the window, her eyes glazed and not really focused on anything.

She always slept less than him, usually staying up late to meditate and often rising earlier than he did, but he’d never known her to suffer from insomnia. Normally, if she was being restless, she would have woken him too, that was just the way it seemed to work between them. For some reason, maybe because he was so tired himself, he’d slept through T’Pol’s obviously disturbed night, until now.

“How long have you been awake?” he thought at her. His conversations with T’Pol hardly ever involved spoken words, their telepathic bond had only strengthened over recent months.

“Some time.” T’Pol spoke out loud and the sound jarred in their quiet quarters. Trip was momentarily surprised. Something was wrong here but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was. The bond between them was usually effortless, but suddenly it was as if there was something interfering with their communication. The only suitable analogy that he could think of was static on a com line.

He tried to use their bond again. “Worried about the Bolians?” He felt a confused rush of almost feelings from T’Pol. He spent a lot of time working out what emotions T’Pol was suppressing at any given moment, and in here he felt the vestiges of apprehension, worry and curiosity. Vulcans did not show emotions, everyone knew that, but it didn’t mean that they weren’t there, under the surface, being suppressed.

This time she did use the bond to reply, and it seemed that the line had cleared. “A lot is at stake.” Perhaps he had just been too tired, he knew that tiredness could affect his clarity of mental communication. The Bolians wanted to form an alliance with the Federation and it was their visit that was probably worrying T’Pol, even though Vulcans weren’t supposed to be susceptible to things like worry or concern.

“Yeah, and why they had to pick us to host this damn thing I don’t know. We’ve got enough work to do without alien dignitaries deciding to come calling.” The thought was out of his head and broadcast before he could temper it. He knew how much this conference meant to T’Pol. It was important to her that she establish her credentials as a diplomat as well as a scientist and leader. He hadn’t forgotten that she had given up command of her own ship so that they could be together of Deep Space One.

“We are the closest Federation outpost.” She was pointedly showing him a map of the sector in her mind.

“Yeah, I know. We couldn’t make them travel all the way to Starbase Two. Are you going to come back to bed?” Even his thoughts were tired sounding.

“I have been having difficulty finding the proper mental state. I will meditate.”

Trip made the mental equivalent of a sigh. He could feel the undercurrent of turmoil in T’Pol’s thoughts. There was something disturbing her, a disquiet, and he could tell that T’Pol was just as baffled as he was by her own inner uneasiness. He was quite prepared to sit up with her if it would help, but he was already running on fumes and he really needed more sleep before his next shift. Doctor Phlox was on another crusade to get him to take more time off, but he never had been good at slowing down.

T’Pol continued her thought to him. “You should go back to sleep. You worked a double shift yesterday.” There was a pause and he half caught a thought that T’Pol probably hadn’t intended to broadcast, “and the previous three days.” T’Pol was presenting him with a mental picture of how tired he had looked when he had come through their door that evening. A series of long days and early starts had all contributed to his general fatigue.

“Excalibur’s workups won’t complete themselves. She’s got to be ready to go day after tomorrow.” He accompanied his own thought to her with a reminder of how bad the damage had been to Excalibur after she had been towed out of the Neutral Zone. The Romulans had made a real mess of the ship and it had taken both his own and Excalibur’s Engineers working flat out for a couple of months to repair the damage. All they had left to do was test that everything was working again, but on a ship the size of Excalibur that took some time. Then there’d be a short shakedown cruise before she properly re-entered service, which Trip hoped would go off without a hitch, if they had done their job right.

“The station Commander is allowed to give the Chief Engineer the morning off.” T’Pol hadn’t turned away from her contemplation of the stars all this time, it wasn’t necessary for her to look at him. Her mental shields were up but not iron clad, just enough to prevent stray thoughts and images leaking into the conversation across the bond.

Trip shook his head. “Nah, can’t spare the time.”

He nevertheless slumped back on the bed. He knew he couldn’t hide this level of fatigue from T’Pol – she knew he desperately wanted to sleep, but equally she was aware of how much he didn’t want her to brood alone. He wondered if it really was the impending arrival of the Bolians that was bothering T’Pol; this seemed to be something more. “Do you want me to stay up with you?”

T’Pol finally turned back to face him. She took the few steps across the room that brought her back to the bed they shared. As always when they slept together, she was naked, and the starlight caught the curves of her body pleasantly. She sat down, crossing her legs on the bed and offered Trip the Vulcan gesture of affection, her two fingers waiting patiently for his to touch hers. If Trip had been less tired this would have led to more; a naked T’Pol bathed in starlight featured prominently in some of his more interesting and enjoyable dreams. But at this ungodly hour, and having had so little sleep, even T’Pol’s beauty wasn’t enough to keep him awake. He reached out and touched her fingers with his own. A shiver ran through him as he felt everything from T’Pol, including an overriding reassurance that she was well. His own worry about her bounced back at him from T’Pol and she pointed out that it was unfounded, showing him its flaws, logically tearing it to pieces.

Trip had been getting better at disarming logic, it wasn’t as foolproof as the Vulcans liked to make out, but tonight he had to acknowledge her crowning argument was true. He’d never be able to stay awake while she sat meditating, if he couldn’t stay awake for “other activities”. Trip suddenly realised that she was now lulling him off to sleep again with deliberately calming thoughts. This was a trick that she hadn’t tried since he’d been laid up with pneumonia and a broken leg a couple of months back. Usually by the time he realised what was happening he was too far gone, and this time was no different. He was asleep before he could protest at her taking this upon herself.

As he closed his eyes he caught the edge of static across their bond again. T’Pol didn’t seem bothered by it and he wondered if it was just him picking this up. He made a mental note to ask her when he woke up if she knew what was going on. Even though they’d been bonded for several years now, he still didn’t really understand how the whole thing worked.

Trip’s sleep was untroubled for most of the night but as morning neared he began to dream. He dreamt of fire lit corridors and debris blocking them. He dreamt of faceless Romulans trying to capture him, and eventually he dreamt of T’Pol, finding him dead on Excalibur, half buried beneath the remains of sick bay. It was a recurring bad dream, one that both he and T’Pol were getting bored of, but his subconscious kept throwing it back up. It appeared more often when he was tired or stressed out, but knowing that it was likely to appear didn’t stop it coming. He found it ironic in some ways that this was the incident that came back to haunt him, he had been through far worse, but he knew that there had been a big difference this time. This time he had felt how T’Pol felt when she thought that he was dead, and try as she might to suppress her emotions, he could still hear them in her mind. She had been falling down a dark hole until Trip had been found safe in Durandal’s sickbay.

It worried Trip a lot that T’Pol had been so single minded. She had never considered that she should stop looking for him, which Trip was glad of, but her fixation on him was the problem. She was a Vulcan, and Vulcans did not behave as humans did (now there was an understatement), but she wasn’t normally the obsessive type. Trip worried most that he had caught the tiniest glimpse that T’Pol had decided not to live on without him. So far he hadn’t plucked up the courage to raise it with her, the question he continually asked himself was whether he’d been correct in what he’d caught, or if he was projecting his own fears onto her. If he was right then this was a big problem, since Vulcans lived a lot longer than humans. Technically he supposed that he was her toy boy and she was his sugar momma, but she acted as if she was roughly the same age as he was, which was all that mattered to him.

He wasn’t dead and the whole thing had ended well, however, telling himself this didn’t stop the dream. Maybe T’Pol’s disquiet had spilled over and caused the nightmare to return. It had happened before, back when they had been on Enterprise, and she was definitely projecting more than usual. Normally her control over her mental powers was solid, but this last week something was up with her. Her concentration seemed to be off, and more often she was having to apologise for letting her shields slip. Trip managed to let his shields slip at least once a day, usually there was a good reason (for example when he’d dropped a hammer on his toe a couple of days ago), but he’d only been doing this for a few years rather than the whole of his life. T’Pol rarely lost even the slightest aspect of her control.

He finally jerked himself awake and found himself once again in an empty bed. The difference now was that the room was also empty and when he looked over at the clock he realised that he was two hours late for his shift.

“T’Pol!” he said in exasperation, as he threw back the covers. She must have turned his alarm off, and sure enough there was a note on the night stand. It was written in her neat copperplate script that looked as if it was trying very hard to be Vulcan characters.

“You were tired and I have arranged for you to take the morning off. Your shift will start after you have met me for lunch.”

It was not signed, but, logically, who else was it from other than T’Pol. Trip was slightly baffled by her need to leave him a note. Normally she would have sensed that he had woken up and simply contacted him via their bond. It reinforced his opinion that something was wrong with T’Pol at the moment and she seemed determined to try to hide it from him. Being able to talk telepathically apparently didn’t mean that they actually communicated, although it certainly made their arguments a lot quicker and was very useful for arranging dinner plans. He once again cursed his ability to pick the most difficult, stubborn woman in the galaxy to fall in love with. He’d never understood women in the first place and Vulcan women were just a whole new level of confusing.

He reached out gently with mental fingers and felt for his t’hy’la. He found her in Command and Control, examining some sensor readings of a nearby binary star system, there had been some concern that the stars were unstable. He could still feel the underlying current of disturbance that was rumbling in the background of her mind. She was doing a very good job of ignoring it.

“You didn’t need to turn my alarm off,” said Trip across their bond. He did feel better for the extra hours of sleep however, so he couldn’t be too mad at T’Pol. It was a measure of just how exhausted he was that he needed them, usually six hours was enough.

“You needed sleep. It was my fault that you awoke. Phlox is still recommending that you rest more.” T’Pol continued her work in C and C while she carried on the telepathic conversation with him.

“Phlox worries too much.”

“He is just concerned for your health, as am I.”

“That works both ways. You’ve been pretty distracted lately.”

“I have many responsibilities.”

“We need to discuss this, T’Pol. It affects me as well, you know.”

There was a spike of quickly suppressed annoyance transmitted across the bond from T’Pol. “I am sorry that our bond causes you so much trouble.”

“Damn it, T’Pol, that wasn’t what I meant and you know it. Let’s talk about it over lunch, okay?”

“Very well,” replied T’Pol. “I will meet you at 1230 in the mess hall. Do not be late.”

Trip had just started the thought that this gave him time to drop by Engineering before meeting T’Pol, when his t’hy’la made it clear this was not something that he should be contemplating. This was supposed to be a morning off and dire consequences would result if he didn’t at least try to relax, away from the Engineering department, for the rest of his free time.

“Okay, okay, I’ll just take a shower and read a book for a few hours.”

“That would be acceptable,” T’Pol thought back to him. Her mental shields slammed back into place, shutting him out completely and this signalled that the conversation was over. She’d left just enough open that Trip could still feel her presence and vice versa.

“Whatever you say, T’Pol. Three bags full, T’Pol,” Trip murmured to himself as he got ready for his shower. With her shields up, he was fairly certain that T’Pol wasn’t really paying attention to him. “Thinks she can order me around whenever she feels like it.”

She might be the Captain of Deep Space One, but she wasn’t in charge of his off-duty life, bond or no bond. Why was it that T’Pol always managed to deflect any concern that he had about her back onto him? She was the one who was having trouble sleeping and yet somehow she had ensured that he got the morning off. She should have been staying in bed, getting some more rest, not him. It infuriated him and made him love her all the more. That brought a small smile to his lips and cheered him up a little as he stepped under the warm water. He wondered if there wasn’t something fundamentally screwed up with the fact that he enjoyed arguing with T’Pol, but it seemed to work for them.

****

When Commander Reed had taken on the job of First Officer on board the Excalibur he knew it would be a tough job, mainly because the ship had just gone one on one with a Romulan warbird, but he hadn’t expected to be spending so much time doing paperwork. He was spending hours in his quarters, signing off repairs, and after action writing reports, which was on top of his usual bridge shifts. In fact, as he was still on the list of injured, he shouldn’t really have been taking shifts on the bridge, but they were still several crewmembers short of a full complement.

Captain Street had also asked him to take on his fair share of letters to the families of the crewmembers who had been lost in the battle, particularly the armoury officers. It wasn’t a task that he relished or one that he felt he was particularly good at, but it had to be done and this was a duty that he took very seriously. The loss of life hadn’t been as great as they had at first feared, but fifteen crewmen had lost their lives and several others had been injured, some so badly that they’d never be serving on a starship again. All in all it meant that twenty new crewmen had arrived to take up various positions over the last few weeks and inductions had to be arranged for all of them. It has also meant that a lot of things that he could normally have delegated to others he had ended up doing himself.

He hadn’t been given a chance to get his hands dirty for some time and he was going a little stir crazy. About the only things that had kept him sane were the regular visits from his friendly neighbourhood Southern Engineer, Trip Tucker, who had been spending a lot of time on Excalibur lately helping out with the repairs. Trip made a habit of stopping by for at least one meal when he was over from Deep Space One, which gave both of them a break from what was proving to be a very tough repair schedule. Reed suspected that T’Pol usually reminded Trip when it was time for lunch, since the Engineer had never been that good in the past about remembering to eat.

Today, however, Trip was not scheduled to be working on Excalibur until the afternoon, a last minute shift change that Reed was also putting down to T’Pol’s handiwork. Trip had worked very long hours the past few days and definitely deserved a morning off. Apparently everyone apart from Trip knew that he wasn’t supposed to pull this sort of thing anymore, but Trip’s solution to everything was to work harder. According to Mister Tucker scarring across a large proportion of his lung tissue was nothing to worry about and the odd episode of breathlessness was just a nuisance. Reed never knew quite how to respond to Trip’s bravado regarding his injuries, especially when he himself preferred to ignore his own broken arm.

He had broken his arm nearly eight weeks ago now in the original Romulan attack on Excalibur, and it was refusing to heal in anything like the normal amount of time. This was the other reason that he had been stuck behind a desk for the last few weeks, he was supposedly on light duty until his arm was out of the cast. He was currently ignoring that recommendation, he didn’t have time for light duty, but he had been banned from the Armoury. Usually he would have been given drugs that promoted bone growth and helped the knitting process, but as was typical of his recent luck, he had a bad reaction to this particular family of drugs. Phlox had tried several, but whatever it was that caused the trouble, was apparently present in every variety. So while Trip’s leg had come out of its cast nearly four weeks ago, he was only just now getting to the point where he could consider getting the cast removed.

There was a knock at the door - another casualty of the Romulan attack had apparently been power to all the doorbells on B deck, this was very low on the list of repairs to be done. He shouted for the person to come in.

“Hi Malcolm,” said the newly promoted Captain Street. She was outlined in light from the corridor that caught the edges of her short blonde hair. She carried a padd in one hand, and Reed could just make out the Starfleet insignia on the front page of whatever document she had been reading.

Reed stood up as she entered, coming to attention. “Captain Street, what can I do for you?”

“Could you just cut the formalities and stick with Rachael when we’re on our own? I feel bad enough about stepping into dead man’s shoes.” Reed noticed that, as soon as the door had shut behind her, she had lost a lot of her self assured demeanour and the weight of command seemed to rest more heavily on her shoulders. Everyone who had received a promotion out of their recent ordeal had more than their fair share of survivor’s guilt, but Captain Street probably had the worst of it. She had known their former Captain a long time, she had been his First Officer for years, and now she had his job.

Reed offered his new Captain a chair, which she took gratefully, slumping into it. He followed her example and took his own seat. It wasn’t that long since she had been released from sickbay herself and she still looked rather pale. Her injuries had been severe but she wasn’t showing any sign that they were slowing her down, except now maybe in the privacy of Reed’s quarters. She let him see what she would never allow the rest of the crew to see, that she wasn’t completely recovered.

Reed knew that she needed a morale boost and that was definitely a part of his duties as her Second in Command that he was happy to carry out. He respected her immensely. He had seen how she handled herself in a crisis and that she didn’t buckle under pressure, but everyone needed a little reassurance.

“You earned this promotion, Rachael. Starfleet wouldn’t have given it to you otherwise.”

“Rubbish. I just happened to be in the right place. It’s easier to promote me than ship someone else all the way out here.”

“Actually I heard that Commander Kelby was bucking for promotion. Tyrfing only left DS One a few weeks ago, I’m sure Kelby would have been only too pleased to stay behind and take the job.”

“Yes, we all know how successful that would have been. He’s a decent engineer but has no imagination. Not exactly my idea of Command material, but you didn’t hear that from me. Anyway, it’s not like I single-handedly rescued Excalibur from the Neutral Zone, unlike my First Officer.”

Reed waved a disparaging hand. “Hah, it certainly wasn’t single-handed and I wouldn’t even say it was my idea. You can thank Captain Tucker for that hare-brained scheme. If I had advised Captain Watanabe better then we wouldn’t have even been in the Neutral Zone.”

“I seem to remember that you advised him that it might be a trap,” said Captain Street.

“Yes, but I agreed with him that if civilians were in danger then we had to go in. I should have been putting the safety of the ship first, not suggesting we go looking for trouble.”

“And if you had, the Kobayashi Maru would have been destroyed with all hands. A lot more people would have been killed. You know we did the right thing.”

Reed nodded. “I do, I suppose, but I just can’t help second guessing myself.”

“In which case I have the perfect assignment for you, all the way from Starfleet HQ.” Street handed Reed the padd that she had been carrying.

Reed scrolled down, skimming the content as he went. “You’re pulling my leg. This has to be a joke.”

“Oh no, they’re deadly serious. They want you to turn the “Kobayashi Maru Incident”, as they’re calling it, into a Starfleet Academy training exercise.”

“I haven’t done this sort of thing for years, not since before my posting to Enterprise. I don’t have time to be playing around with this sort of thing either. We’ve got to get Excalibur ready to launch in just under two days time or we won’t be ready for our shakedown cruise.”

“That would be the other part of your new orders,” said Street with a slightly guilty look on her face. “The problem I’m facing is that you’re the only member of the crew that’s still officially on the injured list. Everyone else has been signed off by Doctor Sonok or Doctor Phlox as fit for full duty, but because your arm is taking longer to heal, well, you’re still on the sick list, and that means you get to have a holiday on Deep Space One while we go out for the shakedown cruise.”

“You’re leaving me behind?” Reed asked with annoyed incredulity. After everything that he’d been through to get Excalibur home it seemed like a slap in the face.

“It’s not for long, I promise, and you’re not losing the SIC post. We’re just going to take her out for a quick spin, a week at most.”

“So you get to take Excalibur out while I sit on Deep Space One, and write simulated training scenarios for snot nosed cadets, who have no comprehension of what it might actually be like to fight in a space battle. All because this damn arm won’t heal quickly enough?”

“Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite like that, but in essence, yes. You know the regs about injured personnel.”

“Yes, but I didn’t expect them to apply in this case. It’s just a broken arm, it hardly bothers me at all.”

“Injured personnel should not be taken into potentially dangerous situations if they can be safely offloaded.” Captain Street quoted from the Starfleet standing orders.

“This hardly counts as a dangerous situation. It’s a shakedown cruise.”

“We’re on the border of the Neutral Zone.”

“Which means there shouldn’t be any Romulans within a light year of here.”

“Shouldn’t being the operative word. Anyway, you need a bit of downtime, Malcolm. You’ve been on call or on duty, in one capacity or another, twenty-four hours a day, since we entered the Neutral Zone. For most of that time, in fact until last week when I was released from sickbay, you’ve been Acting Captain. It’s been stressful for you.”

“I see. That’s what this is really about. You think I’m cracking under the pressure. I can assure you, I’ve been through far worse than a skirmish in the Neutral Zone.”

“Of course I don’t think you’re cracking under the pressure, now you’re just being ridiculous. But I would like my new command to launch with all it’s staff in good health, especially it’s First Officer. You were my first choice for the post, even without the heroics in the Neutral Zone, and I know you’re going to be great, but only if you take some time off, away from this ship.”

“Erm, thank you, I think.” Reed knew that he had never been good at accepting compliments, and he hadn’t got any better over the years. He sighed, realising that Street wouldn’t take no for an answer. “I suppose it would be nice to spend some more time with Captains Tucker and T’Pol. I’ll brief Lieutenant Jones and pack a bag.”

Captain Street gave him one of her special “I’m so pleased you decided to do what I’ve asked you before I kicked your ass” smiles. This particular smile always made Reed glad that he’d complied with whatever she had requested and reminded him that she used to be the Starfleet kickboxing champion. He didn’t ever want to find out whether she could take him in a fight, he suspected that the experiment would hurt.

****

Two hours later, Trip was on his way to meet T’Pol for their planned lunch and very nearly ran into Commander Reed. Despite T’Pol’s earlier protest he had briefly stopped by the airlock that Excalibur was docked at to check in with his Engineers on a couple of tasks. He saw a rather dejected looking Reed step out of the airlock and onto Deep Space One. He noted the kitbag that he carried over one shoulder and immediately began to wonder what was going on. As far as he knew Reed wasn’t scheduled for anything on DS1.

“Malcolm, what are you doing here?” Trip fell in beside Reed as he walked.

“I’ve been kicked out for the week,” replied Reed, crossly.

“You’ve been kicked out?” asked Trip with incredulity. “It’s two days until Excalibur is supposed to be going on its shakedown cruise.”

“I’m aware of that, Captain, thank you. Apparently a broken arm means that I’m not allowed to go. They’ll pick me up again once they’re done and the cast has come off. Captain Street seems to think that I need a holiday.” Reed positively spat the word “holiday” and Trip didn’t think he’d ever heard anyone say it with such venom. Usually people were happy to be on holiday.

“Well, she might have point. You have been pretty much on duty since Excalibur went into the Neutral Zone,” said Trip, trying to be tactful.

“Yes, that has already been pointed out to me.” Reed bristled with annoyance. “They’ve given me some ridiculous training exercise to plan out based on the Kobayashi Maru incident to stop me just sitting here and twiddling my thumbs.”

“That sucks,” said Trip.

“I can’t see it taking me a week in any case,” continued Reed as if he hadn’t heard Trip. “I don’t know what they expect me to do with my time after that. It isn’t like DS1 has a vibrant night life.”

“Maybe they expect you to relax,” said Trip.

“Like you’d know anything about that,” said Reed. “If T’Pol didn’t make you take time off, you’d have worked yourself into the ground by now.”

“It’s just as well that I’ve got T’Pol then,” said Trip, amicably. He could tell that Reed was just spoiling for a fight and he wasn’t going to give in to him. He knew that Reed would only regret it later. “So did you contact C and C for a quarters assignment yet or are you just planning to walk around for the week?”

Reed stopped walking. “I was on my way to Command and Control to report to the watch officer, as protocol demands. I assumed that they would then allocate me some quarters.”

“I think I can give you a shortcut. I’m on my way to see T’Pol for lunch, so you might as well report to her and then I happen to know that there are some quarters on B deck free that you can have. I’d offer you the guest quarters but we’ve got some potential allies arriving tomorrow and we want to make a good impression.”

While he was talking to Reed he was also checking in with T’Pol, who was also on her way to the mess hall, to make sure that she was happy with allocating Reed the quarters on B deck as he suggested. She had no objection and agreed that the Commander could report to her in the mess hall to fulfil the protocol requirement. T’Pol saw little point in standing on ceremony when it came to greeting their colleague of ten years, which Trip found very interesting since, ten years ago, when they first met, T’Pol had been quite keen on protocol.

“Protocol for the sake of protocol is illogical,” pointed out T’Pol, once again managing to pick up one of Trip’s stray thoughts. “I acknowledge that my attitude in this regard has changed however.”

“Do you mind if Malcolm joins us for lunch?” He did wonder sometimes if using the bond for such trivial matters as arranging lunch plans was an abuse of the gift that they’d been given, but then it wasn’t like they could turn it off either. Things like this made up for all the less helpful side effects that came with the bond, for example the fact that if one of them couldn’t sleep it usually meant that neither of them could.

“Not at all. We can pick up our other discussions after our shifts this evening,” replied T’Pol. He could have sworn that he detected a little relief in her thought.

“Trip?” asked Reed, pulling him back to the real world and the corridor.

“Sorry, I was just checking with T’Pol. She agrees with me. We’ll meet her in the mess hall for lunch, then you can go and get yourself settled in. Once you’ve done that, I might have a project to keep you occupied that’s a bit more hands on than planning a training scenario.”

“What sort of project?” asked Reed, a little suspicious. “And is it one that Captain T’Pol has approved?”

“You have such a low opinion of me, Malcolm. Don’t worry, it’s just something that I’ve been meaning to get to but haven’t had the time. If you could look at it, then you’ll be doing me a huge favour, but I’ll explain properly later. Come on, we’d better not keep T’Pol waiting.”

T’Pol had already selected her lunch, and found a table next to the large windows that covered one side of the mess hall, by the time they reached her. The facilities on Deep Space One were larger than they had been on Enterprise, as they had to cater for rather more people. There was a Captain’s mess but T’Pol didn’t like using it, fearing that it would distance her further from her mostly human crew. Instead she made a point of eating at the designated meal times and having exactly the same food as everyone else, or at least the vegetarian option. Trip hadn’t seen her eat any Vulcan food for months. Trip and Reed made their own choices before joining T’Pol at her table.

“Hey, Captain,” greeted Trip, as he sat down. It was important to both of them that they maintained their professionalism when they were on duty in public and that included using ranks when appropriate.

“Captain Tucker,” replied T’Pol. “Commander Reed, it is good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you too, Captain T’Pol,” said Reed, taking the seat beside Trip. Despite their many years of working together, Trip noted that Reed still maintained a formal air around superior officers. “Can I consider this my official report to the Captain?”

“Of course, I’ll let my staff know that you will be staying on Deep Space One until Excalibur completes its shakedown cruise.”

“Thank you. Even if it is a forced leave of absence from Excalibur, I’m glad that it’s given me the chance to spend some time with old friends.”

Trip smirked. “I’m not sure you’ll be saying that once you’ve seen what I have planned for you, and then we’ve got a race by the name of the Bolians coming to visit us.”

“The Bolians? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them,” said Reed.

“They have petitioned to form an alliance with the Federation,” said T’Pol, as she carefully chose a piece of salad from her plate and speared it with her fork.

“From what I’ve read, they’re a bunch of warmongers,” said Trip. “Do you remember that skirmish that Discovery had to break up between the Tralen and the Rigellians?”

“Vaguely,” said Reed, searching his memory.

“It was all about some mining rights that they both thought belonged to them. It turned out that the Bolian government wanted to make a quick buck and sold the rights to both the Tralen and the Rigellians. If it hadn’t been for Discovery straightening things out, the whole situation could have been a lot worse.”

“They have given us assurances that such behaviour is in the past now,” said T’Pol. “However that is one of the topics that we will be discussing.”

“Well I hope they really mean it this time,” said Trip.

Reed nodded in agreement, while trying to eat. “If they want to make an alliance with the Federation then they’ll have to give us some indication that they’re not planning to start a war. It sounds as if they could be trouble. It makes me wish Excalibur was going to be around in case things get out of hand.”

“I think it is unlikely that anything of that nature will occur. Trip has been trying to persuade me that he should accompany Excalibur on its shakedown cruise. I told him that I believed Commander Zukov to be a competent Engineer who would not require his help if anything should go wrong.”

“Now, come on T’Pol, that isn’t exactly fair, I never said anything against Nikolai,” said Trip.

Reed smiled, enjoying the chance to rib Trip. “I would have thought the Chief Engineer of Deep Space One had plenty of work to do here, without taking more on. Besides I don’t see why Trip should get to go when I can’t.”

“Gee, thanks for your support, Malcolm.” He replied sarcastically. “T’Pol does have a point though, I’m not really needed once the final repairs are done. My engineers were mostly just extra manpower anyway. I’m just trying to find an excuse to get out on a ship again. Some days I just…well, I really miss Enterprise.”

Although Trip enjoyed his life with T’Pol on Deep Space One, he couldn’t help but envy Zukov his posting to Excalibur. Although, to be honest, he certainly had plenty in the way of interesting engineering puzzles to keep him occupied. He may not get to play with warp engines that much anymore but he had a rather temperamental reactor that powered the station and certainly kept him on his toes. Plus Deep Space One was the only Federation station in the area and they got enough ships in needing repairs that he could keep his hand in. It still wasn’t that same as being out in the galaxy, exploring, though.

T’Pol moved her fingers slightly so that they touched Trip’s, across the table. It was a discreet gesture to reinforce the feelings of reassurance that she was sending him via their bond. He looked up and into T’Pol’s eyes and shook off the regret, remembering that T’Pol was the most important thing in his life. They had so very nearly lost, forever, the chance to be together. He loved her with every fibre of his being, especially at times like this when she was able to pull him back from the edge of depression. She had given up so much for him, but she reminded him that he had struggled through a lot for her too. Threats by Terra Prime, rejection by her, the grief over the death of their child Elizabeth, the Romulan War, serious injury and he’d persevered through it all. He had never once let her forget that she was the centre of his world. He would do anything for her and that included laying down his life to save her. He knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she would do the same.

Commander Reed cleared his throat, and Trip realised that he and T’Pol had been staring at each other, just basking in pleasant thoughts about one another. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been doing it either and he could feel the waves of embarrassment that were rolling off both of them for the slip. It was a very unusual occurrence for the two of them to become lost like this.

“Sorry,” said Trip, pulling his fingers back, realising that the touch had sparked the whole thing.

“My apologies, Commander,” said T’Pol.

“It’s alright, after all this time, I’m used to the two of you having private conversations,” said Reed.

“Yeah, it does come in handy,” mumbled Trip, knowing that no actual conversation had taken place. T’Pol just gave him a look at his small deception. They were both a little unnerved by their lapse in control and he was aware of T’Pol planning extra meditation sessions for them both that evening. He groaned inwardly, but maintained his calm exterior, not wanting to start a real conversation with T’Pol across their bond and once again exclude Reed.

“So, you mentioned a project that you’d like me to take on while I’m here?” Reed’s less than subtle attempt to change the subject didn’t go unnoticed, but Trip decided that he might as well go with it.

“We designed Deep Space One to be a multi-species science outpost, but during the Romulan War it was retrofitted to be a kind of watch tower. It was equipped with top of the line scanners and sensors but they didn’t have much in the way of weaponry available, so it was outfitted with some pretty prehistoric phase cannons. All I’ve been able to do so far is get them up and running, so that if we do get attacked we can defend ourselves, but that’s it. I’ve been onto Starfleet to send me the parts to upgrade them ever since I got here, but they’ve been dragging their feet. I finally got the parts in last week.”

“You’d like me to supervise the upgrade,” said Reed. It was a statement, not a question.

“If you don’t mind. No one knows phase cannons like you do and I’ve been struggling with the damn things for days. I’d owe you one. Excalibur would go straight to the head of the queue next time you come in for repairs.” Trip gave Reed a hopeful look.

“The Commander is supposed to be resting during his leave from Excalibur,” pointed out T’Pol.

“Come on, T’Pol, you know that he could do this with one hand tied behind his back, no pun intended,” said Trip, looking at his friend’s broken arm.

“Very funny, Mister Tucker. To be honest with you, I’ve never been particularly good at resting. I’d be honoured to help you with the phase cannon upgrade.”

“Great, that’s settled then.” Trip was about to continue when T’Pol’s communicator beeped.

“Command to Captain T’Pol.”

“This is T’Pol, go ahead.”

“Captain, we’ve just picked up the Bolians on short range scanners, they’ll be with us in about half an hour.”

“They’re early,” said T’Pol. “Is everything ready for them?”

“Yes, Ma’am. We are ready to receive our guests.”

“Good, Captain Tucker and I will meet them at the airlock.” She flicked the communicator closed with the ease of someone who received transmissions of this nature all the time. There was no worry or fluster about her and Trip wished he felt as calm as she did.

Trip gave his untouched dessert a longing look, before moving his chair back and rising from the table. “Sorry, Malcolm, it looks like we’re going to have to run. I’ll be in touch about those phase cannons as soon as I get a moment.”

“I am sorry to cut our lunch short, Commander,” said T’Pol, picking up her tray. “Perhaps we can arrange to have dinner with you before you return to Excalibur.”

“I shall look forward to that, Captain.”

****End of Chapter One****

“What do you make of them turning up early?” asked Trip telepathically, as they walked down the corridor. They were on their way back to their quarters to change into their dress uniforms. It was going to have to be an exceedingly quick change if they wanted to be waiting for the Bolians when they arrived.

“I am unsure. It could be a tactic to give them the upper hand early in our discussions.” T’Pol wasn’t giving much mental effort to her reply, she was too engrossed in thoughts about the upcoming negotiations.

“We know when they left Bolarus and when they were supposed to arrive. At my estimate they would have been pulling a comfortable warp five to get here at the original time. Something made them decide to speed up.”

“Evidently,” replied T’Pol. She still wasn’t paying much attention to their conversation and hadn’t tapped into Trip’s thoughts, so she didn’t realise why Trip was seemingly stating the obvious.

“Getting here eighteen hours early, they’d have to be redlining the engines.”

That stopped T’Pol’s mental processes for a minute. Trip had felt the sharp spike of realisation as T’Pol took the information that Trip had given her and worked out that it would mean that the Bolians had to have an extremely good reason to travel at that speed. Then she ran through the reasons that they might be trying to get to Deep Space One as quickly as they could. The whole analysis of the various scenarios that this could mean took T’Pol mere nanoseconds, and Trip watched it all with pride and fascination. She took out her communicator once more.

“T’Pol to Command and Control.”

“Go ahead Captain T’Pol.”

“Have the Bolians contacted us to explain why they are arriving early?”

“No, Captain, but most ships don’t hail us until they’re in docking range.”

“Hail them,” instructed T’Pol.

A few moments passed while the Communications Officer tried her best to raise the Bolians. “Captain, they’re not responding to our hails.”

“Have we detected any other ships on course for the station?” she asked.

“There are a few blips on long range scanners but nothing that’s definitely headed in our direction. That sensor ghost seems to be back again.”

Trip groaned in realisation. “Damn. Sorry, T’Pol, I thought I’d fixed that. I’ll get one of my guys right on it.” Trip pulled out his own communicator and contacted his Engineering department. He arranged for someone to go down to the forward sensor array housing and check out the systems.

T’Pol meanwhile had signed off. “The sensors have not been completely free of anomalies since you made the modifications in order to pierce the Romulan jamming field and detect Excalibur.”

“Yeah, I know, but it’s been fine for a few weeks now, and I said I’d get one of my guys on it. It’s partly your fault anyway, if you’d let me finish the modifications rather than rushing me off to sickbay this wouldn’t have happened.”

“Are you suggesting that I modified the sensor array incorrectly? I recall that I was following your instructions at the time.”

“I’m just saying that you don’t have my touch when it comes to circuitry.” Trip noted T’Pol’s slight annoyance at the lack of logic that he was using here.

“Your instructions were evidently incomplete. They were certainly very untidy.” Trip had his own shorthand that he used for writing engineering notes. One of the useful side effects of the bond was that T’Pol had apparently learnt his shorthand and could now read his handwriting. Or at least could read his handwriting as long as Trip could actually decipher it himself.

“I was suffering from pneumonia at the time, and there was nothing wrong with my instructions.”

“This discussion is not helping to resolve the issue of why the Bolians have increased their speed.” Trip noted that T’Pol had realised that she was losing the argument and diverted the conversation, or at least that was what he was choosing to believe.

“If they’re not being chased, and they’re not answering hails, there’s not much that we can do.” Trip’s hands indicated the expanse of nothingness in front of him.

“There are other, more dangerous, scenarios that could cause them to increase speed.” T’Pol was thinking in particular about some sort of viral contagion, or that the ship had been captured by hostile forces who were using it as a Trojan Horse.

“Maybe we should have an honour guard for them, just in case,” suggested Trip.

T’Pol’s first thought was that this would probably alienate the Bolians before they had even begun their talks, but she was weighing this against the safety of Deep Space One. She took out her communicator once more and arranged for Phlox and a security detail to be present when the Bolians arrived. She specified dress uniforms, hoping that this would make the ceremonial nature of the occasion obvious to their guests.

They reached their quarters with very little time to change into their dress uniforms, and wrestling with Trip’s especially stiff top button took a large chunk of the time available. Trip thought that T’Pol looked stunning, as if she was made to wear the dress uniform, but under her composed exterior, Trip knew that she found the uniform just as uncomfortable as he did. She was just better at hiding it than he was.

He thought to her “you look beautiful. You always look beautiful.”

She raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. However, Trip could feel a small indication of her happiness across their bond and he knew that the compliment had been well received. The official Vulcan line was that compliments were unnecessary and illogical, but T’Pol wasn’t simply a Vulcan. She was his Vulcan and he was damn well going to compliment the woman he loved on how she looked.

He placed a gentle kiss on her lips, intended only to be a reinforcement of his compliment to her. Before he knew it, the two of them were in a passionate embrace, and then the uniforms that they’d just spent the last fifteen minutes putting on were being pulled off. They were both aware that they didn’t really have time for this, but neither of them particularly cared. Sometimes they just needed each other and this was one of those times.

The two senior officers on Deep Space One made it to the airlock mere seconds before the Bolians were due to arrive. No one commented on their lateness, although Trip was certain that a couple of looks were exchanged.

“Are we ready, Commander Al-Nasser?” T’Pol asked her Executive Officer. Commander Kal Al-Nasser had taken on the role of Executive Officer in addition to his duties as Science Officer, despite Trip’s higher rank, at first because Trip had been on light duties when he arrived at the station, but later in order to free him up to spend more time in Engineering. The arrangement seemed to work well and Trip had never been keen on the idea of all the paperwork that would have accompanied the role.

“Yes, Ma’am,” said Al-Nasser.

The security guards stood ready, all in their dress uniforms, but also all armed. Lieutenant Izzy Patterson, Head of Station Security, stood beside them, her own dress uniform perfectly turned out and a sidearm at her hip. Her dark brown hair was tied back into a severe ponytail, and even in her dress uniform she looked ready for action.

“Have we received any further communication from the Bolian ship?” asked T’Pol.

“Nothing, Captain. Ensign Kinsey has been trying to reach them since they came within range of docking control. We’ve sent them docking instructions but had no response.” Al-Nasser’s dark eyes betrayed a little concern at this.

“What about life signs?” asked Trip.

“We haven’t had much experience detecting Bolian life signs, sir, but we think a crew of about sixty are on board. If what Doctor Phlox told us is to be believed, they have very interesting biology.”

“Where is Phlox, I thought he was meeting us here too,” said Trip.

“I’m here, I’m here,” said Phlox, walking rapidly towards them. “Ensign Han had a rather unfortunate accident in the mess hall.”

Trip gave Phlox a questioning look. Ensign Li Han, although a fine security officer, was well known for her lack of grace, and seemed to spend more than her fair share of time in sickbay.

“Probably best that I don’t say anymore,” added Phlox.

“It sounds like it, Doc,” said Trip with a smirk.

Commander Al-Nasser’s communicator beeped and he answered it rapidly. A tinny voice from the other end reported that the Bolian ship was approaching the designated docking port as per their instructions. It seemed that the Bolians were receiving transmissions even if they weren’t sending them. There were standard Starfleet procedures for bringing ships in to dock without radio communication but Trip doubted that the Bolians would have known what they were. He was glad that they hadn’t needed to use them.

Trip felt the impact of the ship docking run through the deck beneath his feet. There was a short wait while the Bolians readied to disembark, but finally the airlock swished open and their blue skinned guests stepped through. There were five Bolians in the party, their skin was of varying shades of blue and a ridge ran down the middle of their faces. Not one of the party members had a single hair on their heads, the female members included.

T’Pol was waiting ready with her hand out in the Bolian gesture of welcome, a flat open palm held horizontally. Trip knew that she had been rehearsing this meeting for some time and had indelibly imprinted upon her mind the order of actions that she now needed to perform. The Bolian Ambassador raised his own hand, palm down and held it about an inch over T’Pol’s open hand. The two hands did not touch and this was an important aspect of Bolian culture, touching was only between family members or potential mates.

T’Pol withdrew her hand and held it across her chest. The Bolian copied the manoeuvre and then added his other arm across the first. T’Pol copied him and together the two gave a small bow to the other. The complete ritual had been conducted in silence, and it would have caused terrible offence had any words been spoken. Trip had laughed out loud when T’Pol had first described the ritual greeting to him and wouldn’t honestly have been surprised if it had required hopping on one leg. However the Bolians considered the formal greeting essential to future talks and T’Pol getting it completely right had just brought them one step closer to a signed treaty. He silently congratulated his bond-mate for her fantastic performance.

“I am Captain T’Pol of Deep Space One. We welcome you to our station.”

“My name is Ambassador Mim Kathar. We are all glad to be here to negotiate this historic treaty between your Federation and Bolarus IX.”

“Allow me to introduce the station’s Department Heads. This is Captain Tucker, the Chief Engineer.” T’Pol indicated Trip, who gave a small bow of his own.

“It’s an honour, sir,” said Trip. The Bolian Ambassador reciprocated the bow.

“My Executive and Science Officer, Commander Al-Nasser,” said T’Pol, moving on. Al-Nasser and the Bolian bowed to each other. Trip felt a small flicker from T’Pol that she was gratified that everything had gone well so far. “Lieutenant Patterson, Head of Station Security, and finally, our Chief Medical Officer, Doctor Phlox.” Doctor Phlox was beaming at the new arrivals.

“I was expecting Admiral Archer to be here,” said Mim Kathar. “We were told that we would be negotiating with someone who could speak for the Federation.”

“I have been given full authority to negotiate with you,” said T’Pol, clasping her arms behind her back.

“You are a mere Captain. This could be seen as a grave insult to our people,” replied the Bolian, ignoring T’Pol. “I refuse to open negotiations with anyone other than Admiral Archer.”

Trip could almost physically hear T’Pol suppressing her annoyance and indignant exasperation at the turn this first meeting had taken.

“Admiral Archer is not on the station and I do not know his current whereabouts. It would be extremely unlikely that we could arrange his presence at such short notice. Perhaps we could begin preliminary discussions and involve the Admiral if we need to at a later stage.” T’Pol was amazingly calm, and certainly more calm than Trip, who was ready to strangle their guests. He was having to restrain himself from rolling his eyes in case the Bolians saw him.

“No, we will not even countenance beginning negotiations unless the Admiral is here. He is the person that the Bolians have dealt with before and we saw that he was a fair man. Hope you will excuse me say this, but I know nothing about you, Captain T’Pol. Our relations with the Vulcans have been poor in the past. Who is to say that you will not bring past prejudices into our discussions, even unconsciously.”

“I can assure you that will not be the case.”

Once again the Bolian ignored T’Pol’s words. “I assume that you have quarters ready for us. Please take us there and let me know when you have contacted the Admiral. We will talk again then.”

“Very well,” said T’Pol. “Lieutenant Patterson will show you the way.”

The Bolians bowed, as one, to the assembled officers and then followed Lieutenant Patterson towards their quarters. Their blue heads bobbed slightly as they walked away down the corridor.

“Well, that could have gone better,” said Trip, once they were well out of earshot. “And they didn’t even give us an explanation for why they turned up early.”

Phlox gave a small shrug. “It would appear that good manners are not an important part of Bolian culture.”

“Indeed,” said T’Pol. “I need to contact the Admiral.”

Suddenly, the lights dimmed around them, and after flickering for a few seconds came back to full brightness.

“What the hell was that?” asked Trip.

T’Pol just shot him a meaningful look. She didn’t even need to make use of their bond for Trip to know what she was thinking this time.

“Right, Chief Engineer, I’ll be in Main Engineering. If it’s anything serious, I’ll let you know.” Trip headed off towards Main Engineering and the reactor that powered the station. Flickering lights could only mean a problem with the power and the first thing to check was the reactor.

****

T’Pol sat down in her Ready Room just off Command and Control and prepared herself for a conversation that the she didn’t particularly want or, in her opinion, need to have. She had been completely floored by the Bolians’ request that Archer be involved in the talks and was now concerned how this turn of events would be perceived by Starfleet Command. She needed to be seen as a consummate diplomat who could negotiate even the toughest of treaties and she had fallen at the first hurdle. It would seem as if she was running to Archer to solve her problems.

The com sounded. “I have Admiral Archer on the subspace band for you, Captain.”

“Thank you,” replied T’Pol. “Please put him through.” She took a deep breath and centred herself. She felt the trickle of emotion from Trip in engineering – something was frustrating him, but she pushed that to one side and focused on her current task.

Admiral Archer appeared on the screen. He gave T’Pol a friendly smile, no doubt expecting to hear good news from her. “T’Pol, I wasn’t expecting you to have time to call today. I thought you’d be settling in with the Bolians. Trip behaving himself?”

“Trip is fine. The Bolians, however, have been causing some difficulties.”

“What kind of difficulties?” Archer’s smile had vanished.

“They are refusing to begin negotiations unless you are present. They regard my designation as negotiator an insult. They have agreed to remain on the station only until you could be contacted. We may need you to come to Deep Space One in order to open negotiations.”

“T’Pol, I’m on Starbase Two, it’s not like it’s a short walk down the street.”

“I assumed that Tyrfing was still in dock?” T’Pol asked hopefully. After the battle in the Romulan neutral zone the ship had taken some damage. Deep Space One had its hands full with Excalibur’s repairs, so as the less damaged ship, it had gone on to Starbase Two.

“No, she left yesterday. Athena stopped off to take on more crew, perhaps I can twist Captain Stewart’s arm to make a detour to DS1, but it’ll be a few days.”

“Hopefully I can persuade the Bolians to wait for your arrival.”

“I’m sure you can, T’Pol. I have complete faith in you. I just wish the Bolians did too.” Archer still had a way of making her feel appreciated.

“Thank you, Admiral. I will do my best.”

The lights took that moment to flicker once more, and T’Pol silently wondered if anything else could go wrong today. Trip of course caught the stray thought across their bond, and asked her to not tempt fate.

“Having technical trouble?” asked Archer.

“Trip is looking into it,” replied T’Pol.

Archer took the reply at face value and didn’t probe any further, for which T’Pol was glad, because she had no idea what she would have said. Normally she would have asked Trip but currently he had no idea what was going on either. As she tried to tune into his thoughts she realised that she was finding it difficult to focus on him. It was another manifestation of what Trip had been referring to in his thoughts as “static on the line”, but it was difficult to describe to anyone who had never experienced a bond exactly how it felt. She concentrated and was able to clear the interference, finally picking up Trip’s thoughts clearly. It was then that she realised that Archer had been talking and she hadn’t been paying attention.

“I’ll let you know when we have an ETA,” finished Archer. He seemed to be checking something on a padd while he was talking to her and had only looked up at the end of his sentence.

“Of course,” said T’Pol, hoping that Archer hadn’t noticed her momentary lapse. The lapse in concentration itself was yet another cause for concern. They exchanged the usual formalities about how things were going on the station in general and signed off.

With a blank screen in front of her tried once again to listen in to Trip’s thoughts. She could reach the outer layers, which was merely his presence in her mind, but to actually tap into what he was thinking took considerably more effort. She could only think of a very small number of things that would cause this problem, even some of those were discounted due to Trip being human, and none of them were good. The most likely cause of difficulty was some type of neurological problem, which would most logically be affecting her rather than him, given her medical history. The damage created by her addiction to Trellium whilst in the Delphic Expanse had never completely healed, despite Phlox’s best efforts. In theory, they should not have been able to form such a strong bond with only one telepathic partner in the pairing and if she lost her telepathic abilities then the bond would most likely dissolve.

A feeling of dread was building in the back of her mind and this was not the first time this had happened over the past few days. It was because she feared, above everything else, losing her bond with Trip, the human she had come to love so completely against all logic. The bond had been created accidentally but it did not make it any less real or valuable to them. Losing the bond now would be like losing a limb, and she had no idea how the two of them would deal with it. If the bond have never been formed then the situation would be different, but it had, and now she doubted they would be able to continue without it. They would be grief stricken by the loss of the subtle shades of meaning that the bond gave every sentence the other uttered. The bond gave them an insight into the other’s thoughts and meant that they were never alone, a corner of their minds forever belonging to the other. She did not want to be alone ever again.

She had meditated longer than usual yesterday evening but it had not quelled all of her feelings. The residue of her fear had been what had prevented her from sleeping the previous night and, although she had done her best to shield her mental disquiet from Trip, some of it had spilled over. Apparently that part of their bond was still working perfectly, which was rather annoying. She had had to concentrate very hard to prevent him detecting her terrible fear and yet letting him think that all was well. She had made it seem as if her shields were less rigid than they really were and spewed out false calm. In fact she had concentrated so hard that she had been unable to reply through their bond to his first question. He had been perplexed by that but had dismissed it as simply tiredness. Trip had picked up on something though and hence their planned conversation this evening, which she was already setting out in her mind.

She hated hiding things from him, but until she could confirm what the problem was, she wanted to protect him a little longer. He had only really just recovered his mental health after nearly losing his life. He still occasionally suffered from days of depression, although they were becoming less frequent as the incident receded into the past and he healed, became stronger, mentally and physically. His instinct was to protect her, but at the same time she felt that she needed to protect him. In reality they supported one another, but the bond they shared played a large part in facilitating that. Would they still be there for each other without the bond to guide them? In short, was their relationship strong enough to withstand its loss?

She knew that she had only one course of action and that was to see Phlox. Only he could verify or discount her fears. If this was something physical then he could perhaps find a cure or at least let her know how long she had until the bond failed. If it wasn’t physical then she faced a more difficult problem but at least illness would have been ruled out. The question now was how to prevent Trip from discovering her visit to sickbay?

She had just begun to put serious thought to the question, but the lights flickered once more and the computer screen in front of her joined them. She pushed all other thoughts out of her mind and went to find her Chief Engineer, who she knew was currently struggling with the problem of what was causing these power disruptions. A face to face update would make it easier for her to maintain the appearance that there was nothing wrong with their bond, or at least she hoped that this was the case. Trip’s mental powers were becoming more accurate and practiced. She was finding it more and more difficult to keep things from him without shutting him out completely, which was possible but made it rather obvious that she was hiding something. She actually found herself gratified that a technical problem was keeping Trip occupied so that he didn’t have time to notice how distracted she was.

Deep Space One’s reactor was now several years old and, in Trip’s words, was a “temperamental son of a bitch”. He had recently been spending long days trying to push through upgrades that would solve some of its problems, but still it persisted in malfunctioning. As it was the main source of power for the entire station, which of course included power for life support, it was a cause for some concern to everyone on DS1. The fact that it was still causing the engineering team problems months after Trip had begun his upgrade program was something that her Chief Engineer was beginning to take personally.

T’Pol stepped into Main Engineering and was immediately greeted by a wave of emotion from Trip. Close proximity to each other meant that their link was at its strongest, but normally she wouldn’t have expected to experience such powerful feelings from her mate. However this was explained by the level of frustration that Trip was currently feeling. He was leaning against one of the consoles, one hand rubbing the back of his neck and the other tapping furiously at the touch sensitive buttons on the display. As soon as she stepped into the room he was aware of her presence, and looked up briefly as she entered.

She came over to the console so that she too could look at the display.

“You didn’t need to come down here. I’ve got no idea what the hell it’s playing at, so I’ve got nothing to report.” Trip was staring at the latest readouts, and T’Pol didn’t need to read his mind to know that he wasn’t happy with what he had found, it was plainly written on his face. This was one of those situations where they were in a public space and it was inappropriate to hold a conversation over their bond for which T’Pol was grateful at the moment. They still preferred to keep their relationship low key and ignore it entirely, if possible, during the working day.

“You have been unable to find anything wrong?” asked T’Pol.

The lights flickered again as if to taunt Trip, and he glanced up at the ceiling. “Well something is obviously wrong with the son of bitch, but I’m damned if I can figure out what the hell it is. Everything on the reactor seems to be functioning normally but we’re still getting these glitches. The only thing I can think of is to go through all the wiring bundles in the EPS grid. Maybe there’s something wrong with one of them that’s causing some kind of recursive failure state, but I’m clutching at straws here.”

“Systematically checking every wiring bundle will take a considerable amount of time,” T’Pol pointed out.

“Yes, tell me about it. I guess we’d better get started. We can begin with the closest ones to Engineering and work outwards.” Trip grabbed a padd and tapped out a work schedule. He called over his SIC Engineering, Lieutenant Vega and handed him the padd, explaining what he wanted done as he did so. Vega nodded and got a team together, who began pulling off the nearest wall panel to get access to the wiring bundles behind it.

Trip turned to T’Pol with a smile. “Now that’s what I call an efficient Engineering Department.”

T’Pol allowed the touch of an almost smile to grace her lips. She knew how much it pleased Trip to have everything running smoothly.

“How did it go with contacting the Admiral?” asked Trip, turning back to his readouts on the display in front of him.

T’Pol’s non-smile disappeared completely. “He is coming to Deep Space One and expects to be here in approximately two days time. In the mean time it is our duty to keep the Bolian Ambassador occupied.”

“Great,” said Trip, sarcastically. He had already registered that she had her shields up unusually strongly at the moment but he preferred to give her some privacy rather than pry into things that she obviously didn’t want him to know about. He was assuming that the Admiral had told her something confidential about the Bolians. “Just what we need around here, a bunch of caustic diplomats to baby-sit. Any ideas what you’re going to do with them?”

“Persuading them not to leave will be my primary activity I believe, however I may arrange a tour of the station.”

Trip rolled his eyes. “That’s not going to keep them occupied for long and I bet they get taken for tours round every station they visit. Invite them along to movie night; it’d make them feel welcome and give them something to do.”

“I’m not entirely sure that it is appropriate to introduce diplomatic ambassadors to this particular aspect of human culture so early in our relationship with them.”

Trip narrowed his eyes slightly as he glanced up at T’Pol. “Are you saying that our films aren’t good enough to show to the Bolians?” Trip had been rather horrified and intrigued to discover that while the Vulcans did have television, the media was purely factual, showing mainly news, weather, educational material, and, occasionally, kal-toh championships. Given what she had seen of human television and film making, his reaction was understandable, if slightly unexpected, but she came to understand as she got to know him that he gained a lot of pleasure from this particular form of entertainment.

“I am simply suggesting that they might find it difficult to understand,” replied T’Pol. “Their experiences with humans have been very limited so far.”

Unfortunately they did not get to continue their conversation, from behind them where the team was working on the wiring there was a loud bang and a yell as Lieutenant Vega was flung backwards. The wiring burst into flames, billowing out acrid black smoke. Trip was in motion towards his SIC before he had even hit the deck, calling instructions to his engineers as he moved.

“Call Phlox!” he shouted back towards T’Pol, but she had already pulled out her communicator as she too knelt beside Trip and did what she could to help Lieutenant Vega. Trip began CPR and, as she assisted, her assessment was that the Lieutenant had somehow received a massive shock from the power cables. The team at the panel were currently following fire control procedures. It didn’t take Phlox long to arrive with a gurney and a team of medics and Trip and T’Pol were able to relinquish their places beside the stricken Lieutenant to the medical team. Trip immediately turned to the Engineers who had been working on the wiring.

“What the hell happened?”

T’Pol had seen Trip like this on a few occasions before. Trip always took it personally when something went wrong, and he took it even more personally when one of his people was injured because of it. She stood back and waited for answers. This was Trip’s area of expertise and if she stepped in now to ask questions it would undermine him in front of his crew.

A young looking female Ensign answered him. “I don’t know, sir. We followed procedure to the letter and the circuit wasn’t supposed to be live.”

“I want the fault traced and this time check whether there’s any current running through it before you touch anything. I want the accident report on my desk by the end of the shift,” said Trip.

“Yes, sir.”

“I would also like a copy of the report, Ensign,” said T’Pol.

“Yes, Ma’am,” said the Ensign with a nod, scurrying off to do the bidding of her CO.

Trip ran a hand through his hair. T’Pol felt the frustration that poured off him. She could see the calculations as they ran through his mind, how much current had been running through those cables and how likely it was the Phlox would be able to save the injured engineer. It was followed by a list of possible causes for the circuit appearing to be disconnected, when it wasn’t, and how this might all relate to the reactor problem. That was if it even was the reactor causing the problem.

Now she made use of the bond. “Do not work too late tonight,” she thought to him. He had just given her the most comprehensive status report possible and he hadn’t even really registered it. He smirked a little at her assumption that he would be working late, and that she knew him so well.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can, t’hy’la,” he sent to her. “That goes for you too. I bet those Bolians can be real party animals.”

T’Pol raised an eyebrow. Anyone watching them would have been unaware of the reason for her expression. Her communicator beeped at her. She pulled it out of her pocket, and flicked it open in one smooth motion.

“Commander Al-Nasser to Captain T’Pol.”

“Go ahead, Commander,” replied T’Pol.

“Captain, we have a problem. One of the Bolians decided to go exploring. Ensign Carver just found him in one of the cargo stores. He’s dead, Ma’am.”

****End of Chapter Two****


Commander Al-Nasser, Lieutenant Patterson, and Captain T’Pol stood in Cargo Store Three looking at the body of a dead Bolian diplomat, while Doctor Phlox examined the corpse more closely.

“Time of death, Doctor?” asked Patterson.

“Not long ago, probably no more than a couple of hours,” said Phlox. “It’s difficult to be certain with Bolian physiology. I suggest we move the body as quickly as possible to prevent any hazardous substances leaking out of the body.”

T’Pol nodded in agreement, given her research into Bolian physiology she had an idea of just how toxic Bolian bodily fluids were. There were no obvious external wounds on the body but how the Bolian had died was not immediately obvious. His face was a picture of abject terror.

“Have you been able to identify the cause of death?” asked T’Pol.

“Until I’ve performed a full autopsy, I can’t give you a definitive answer, Captain, but my preliminary findings suggest that he sustained a massive electrical shock.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, Doctor. There isn’t anything here that could do that,” said Al-Nasser.

“It isn’t my job to explain how it happened, Commander. I leave that to you and Lieutenant Patterson,” said Phlox. “All I can tell you is the condition of the body in front of me.”

“Finding out why he was here in the first place would be a good start,” said Patterson. She had already taken out her own scanner and was examining the floor around the body. “I can’t detect any evidence that the body was moved here. I think he fell where he died.”

“What in God’s name was he doing in the cargo store?” mused Al-Nasser.

T’Pol looked around at the boxes that were currently being kept there. “What is in these crates?”

“Spare parts for Engineering mainly,” said Al-Nasser. “Nothing that would interest our guests.”

“None of this makes any sense,” said Patterson. “There’s no reason for him to be here and no way for him to get killed.”

“Lieutenant Vega sustained an electric shock earlier today while working on wiring in Engineering,” said T’Pol. “This may indicate that the power problems are related to this incident. Captain Tucker should be able to give you further information on this.”

“Yes, Ma’am, I’ll get down to Engineering right away,” said Patterson.

“I’ll see if I can find out what he was doing here. This isn’t going to make our job any easier with the Bolian treaty,” said Al-Nasser. “How are you going to break the news to them?”

“As delicately as I can, Commander. It will make my task considerably easier if I have some facts to present to the Ambassador. I will expect you to contact me immediately if you find anything that you relevant.”

“Yes, Captain,” her two officers replied.

“Your autopsy results would also be appreciated rapidly, Doctor,” said T’Pol.

“Of course, Captain.”

“In the mean time, I will inform the Ambassador,” said T’Pol.

The reactions of the other officers were enough to tell her that they didn’t envy her the task.

****

Trip felt someone tap him on the shoulder. He was engrossed in the power readings from the latest diagnostics on the reactor. Phlox had called down to Engineering a little earlier to say that Lieutenant Vega was doing well despite his brush with death, and he was determined to find out what had caused the injury to his Lieutenant. He turned around to find Commander Reed behind him.

“How long have you been standing there?”

“A couple of minutes,” said Reed, his arm folded across the other one, which was supported in a sling. “You seemed distracted.”

“It’s these damn power readings. I just don’t understand what’s going on. For once, the reactor is working how it’s supposed to.” Trip slammed the padd down on the console in front of him. “And now we have a dead Bolian on our hands.”

“A dead Bolian? What happened?”

“I don’t know and, at the moment, I don’t care,” said Trip, looking down at the console. “I’m more concerned that my Second in Command got an almost lethal shock off an EPS wiring bundle that was supposed to have been safe. The Bolians are currently a long way down my list of things to worry about.”

“I can imagine. I wonder if T’Pol would like some help investigating,” said Reed.

Trip’s head jerked up. “Malcolm, you’re on light duty and you have a broken arm. The Station Security guys can handle it.”

Reed sighed. “I’m sure you’re right. I suppose that now would be a bad time to remind you that you promised me some phase cannons to work on?”

“Well, I’m not getting anywhere here,” said Trip, indicating the readouts in front of him. “Maybe a change of scenery will help.”

Malcolm smiled. “Glad to be of service.”

Trip briefly smiled back briefly until, suddenly, he stopped.

Reed noticed the change in expression. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s this damn bond. I just don’t seem to be able to shut T’Pol out today like I usually can when I need to work.” Trip shook his head in mild annoyance. He and T’Pol really needed to find a moment to talk about this, but it wasn’t looking like that was going to happen any time soon.

“I expect it’s probably the stress of this power problem making you less able to focus. I remember you had problems when you were in hospital.”

“That was the pain medication messing things up. This isn’t the same. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. I’ve never been as good as T’Pol at all this mental blocking stuff.”

“That isn’t surprising given that she was born with telepathic abilities and you weren’t. What was the reason for the unhappy face?”

“T’Pol’s telling the Bolian Ambassador that one of his entourage is lying dead in the Cargo Store.”

It was like the Bolian was in the same room shouting at him rather than T’Pol, complaining that the station wasn’t safe and generally saying some nasty things about Vulcans. T’Pol was calmly explaining that she would be assigning some more security guards to the Bolians, but of course, Mim Kathar was taking this as an insult, whilst simultaneously complaining that this should have been done when they arrived. The illogicality of it all was annoying T’Pol, but she was doing a reasonable job of calming the Bolian down whilst reassuring him that there would be a full investigation. She finally extricated herself, but not before the Ambassador had threatened dire consequences if a full explanation for what had happened to his compatriot was not given. Trip had expected them to use it as another reason to leave, but it seemed that the treaty was important enough that this wasn’t reason to give up on it just yet.

Trip shook his head. “It’s not going too well.”

“You do surprise me,” said Reed, sarcastically. “Maybe some phase cannon upgrades will take your mind off things.”

“I hope so,” said Trip. He gave himself a mental shake and was able to shut T’Pol out again. “Come on, I’ll take you down to the Armoury.”

The Armoury was on one of the lower levels of the station. A crew of Armoury staff were currently in the process of removing one of the cannons ready for the new parts to be installed.

“When you told me that these cannons were old, I didn’t realise that you meant prehistoric,” said Reed as he examined the cannon.

“Well, this is why I need you, Malcolm,” said Trip. “I’m betting that you’ve worked on this type at some point.”

“It would be a safe bet,” replied Reed. “So who’s in charge down here? I assume that you have let them know that I’ll be working on these weapons.”

“Erm, actually, I haven’t had time,” said Trip, looking a little embarrassed.

“Trip! You know I can’t touch these without the Armoury officer’s say so,” said Reed.

“Don’t worry, I’ll talk to Izzy today and get it all sorted out,” said Trip.

“Izzy? Wait a minute, do you mean Izzy Patterson? Dark hair, dark eyes, Scottish accent?”

“Yes, why?”

“Do you remember when we put in for repairs at Starbase Two, about three years ago?”

“She’s that Lieutenant Patterson?”

Reed nodded.

“You should probably stay out of her way then,” said Trip, warningly.

“Actually, I was thinking that I should go and talk to her,” said Reed, the hint of mischief behind his eyes.

“Malcolm, you said that she didn’t want to see you again. Ever.”

“It was all just a slight miscalculation. I really didn’t expect to get her into trouble.” Reed looked rather sheepish.

“I know, you were just trying to help, but when you destroy an armoury range, you have to expect a few repercussions,” pointed out Trip. “If I was you, I’d stay away.”

“Captain Tucker, Ensign Fujita said that I’d find you down here.” Lieutenant Izzy Patterson, formerly of Starbase Two, walked into the Armoury, a padd held nonchalantly in her left hand, and stopped in her tracks. “Commander Reed, what are you doing in my Armoury?” She turned to Trip. “What is he doing in my Armoury?”

“Izzy, it’s okay. He’s just here until Excalibur’s completed her shakedown cruise, so I asked him to give us a hand and supervise the phase cannon upgrade.” Normally he and Patterson had fairly friendly interactions and were, informally, on first name terms, but she had a temper to equal his own when things didn’t go her way.

“You want him to upgrade my phase cannons? You did hear about what happened on Starbase Two, didn’t you?”

Trip nodded. “That was an accident, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, which I got blamed for,” replied Patterson, crossly. “Damned experimental weapons test. Commander Ferris had me cleaning plasma conduits for a week.”

“I know that Commander Reed can get carried away sometimes…” started Trip.

“He destroyed the Armoury firing range!”

“Hey!” said Reed, indignantly. “It wasn’t completely destroyed.”

“If either of you had checked the power settings on those new rifles then it wouldn’t have happened. So listen up. The way I figure it, since we just discovered a dead Bolian on the station, you’ve got plenty to do, Lieutenant, without supervising the upgrading of these phase cannons. And with all the power problems, I’ve got more than enough on my plate at the moment. Commander Reed is sat around twiddling his thumbs, so we might as well put him to good use.” Trip noted that he now had both Reed and Patterson glaring at him. Reed probably didn’t like the suggestion that he had nothing to do with his time, he knew how much Reed hated sitting around. He decided that some placation was in order. “Izzy, you have to admit that he’s an expert on phase cannons.” He indicated Reed with a thumb. She couldn’t possibly fault this argument, in many cases Reed had literally written the book on phase cannons. The current Armoury weapons maintenance manual was more than ninety percent his work.

Patterson gave a grudging sigh, and then grinned a rather dangerous looking grin. “My apologies Captain, you’re right, Commander Reed has far more experience with this particular type of phase cannons than I do. After all, he is considerably older than I am. I’d be happy for him to supervise the upgrade.”

Trip heard Reed choke beside him, but pressed on. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Why were you down here looking for me anyway?”

“Doctor Phlox thinks that the Bolian was electrocuted. Captain T’Pol said that Lieutenant Vega had been injured earlier today and that both incidents might be related to the power problems. I was hoping that you could shed some light on how our Bolian got electrocuted.” Patterson presented the padd that she’d been holding to Trip.

Trip examined the contents of the padd. “This doesn’t make any sense. There’s nothing of high enough current in the Cargo Store to kill a man and all the power conduits are normally inaccessible without the proper tools.”

“But we still have a dead Bolian,” said Patterson.

Trip shook his head in puzzlement. “I’ll go down there myself and see if I can work out what happened. He’s the second person today to get shocked on something that shouldn’t have been live and if we’ve got a serious problem then I need to know.”

“Perhaps it was deliberate,” said Reed. “Maybe someone else was there.”

“There’s no evidence that anyone else was in the room with him,” said Patterson.

“What about the surveillance footage?” asked Reed.

“There isn’t any. Deep Space One is still being re-fitted, and we haven’t gotten around to installing all the cameras in that area,” said Trip.

“Convenient,” said Reed.

“There are better and easier ways to kill someone than electrocution,” said Patterson.

“But few that look like an accident,” Reed interjected.

“It only looks like an accident if there is actually something near by to be electrocuted on,” replied Patterson, tersely.

Trip’s communicator beeped at him and he answered it, glad of the distraction from what looked as if it was building into another argument.

“Commander Al-Nasser to Captain Tucker.”

“Tucker here, go ahead.”

“Sir, we’ve had a report that the resequencers in the mess hall are malfunctioning.”

“Great, this is just turning out to be one peach of a day,” said Trip. He’d told T’Pol not to tempt fate. This was what happened if you ignored Murphy’s Law and Engineers knew all about Murphy’s Law. “I’ll send someone down, Commander.”

“Thank you, sir. Al-Nasser out.”

Trip called down to Engineering and got a couple of his people assigned to the resequencer problem. He didn’t like taking anyone off the power problem but for all he knew this new problem could be related. He snapped his communicator shut with more force than was really necessary. He reached out across his bond and found the calm mind of T’Pol. He anchored himself on her cool logic for a second.

“T’Pol, I have resequencer problems. I’m guessing the power’s screwing with them. I’ve sent a couple of guys down to sort it out so it should be fixed in time for the dinner crowd. I’m going down to look at the Cargo Store and see if I can find anything that could have electrocuted our Bolian friend.”

“He was not our friend. We barely knew him,” T’Pol thought back to him. “Apparently the Ambassador thought of him quite highly. He was not particularly keen on the idea of an autopsy however, but I have persuaded him that it is necessary.” She was currently on her way to sickbay to see Doctor Phlox, and was mulling over her encounter with the Ambassador. He had asked to see the body but she had persuaded him to wait until the autopsy was complete.

“Does he have a name?” asked Trip.

“Trell Chev. He was one of the Ambassador’s advisors on human customs. It is likely that his curiosity got the better of him. He was interested in learning more about humans and being on a human built station may have tempted him to explore without authorisation.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Trip thought back. “I guess I’d be curious if I was on a Bolian space station too. Want to meet for dinner?”

“I doubt there will be time.”

Trip gave T’Pol a mental sigh. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” For a moment he felt as if T’Pol was relieved that they wouldn’t be seeing each other for dinner, but the feeling was gone as quickly as it had come. He guessed that she just needed the time to work. He definitely had the feeling that she was hiding something, but she hid stuff all the time just to keep him from getting overloaded by her thoughts.

The entire exchange had taken only a few seconds. Conversations were a lot faster when you thought them and he doubted the other two officers had even noticed.

“I’m going down to the Cargo Store,” said Trip to Reed and Patterson. “Call me if you need any help on the phase cannons.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Reed, which made Trip smile. They’d been friends for years and Reed still occasionally called him “sir”, but then he couldn’t break the habit of calling Archer by his rank either. It reminded him of old times.

“I’ll be with Commander Al-Nasser going over the surveillance feeds that we do have,” said Patterson. “If I come up with anything then I’ll let you know.”

Trip nodded. “Okay, keep T’Pol up to date as well.”

“Yes, sir,” said Patterson.

“And try to stay out of each other’s hair,” said Trip as he left the room.

He heard both officers reply rather grudgingly. “Yes, sir.”

****

T’Pol disliked sickbay, she always had, and her earlier encounter with the Bolians had not put her in a good mood. Enterprise’s sickbay had never had particularly good associations for her, she had spent too much time in it as a patient. Of course Starfleet insisted on using the same design, albeit on a different scales, for every single sickbay on a human vessel that she had ever entered. So not only did this sickbay have all the memories of Trip’s recent run in with pneumonia and his broken leg, but it managed to remind her of every time either she or her mate had been injured or sick since they had met. This was one of the areas where having a bond was definitely of detriment because she also now had access to Trip’s memories of what each of those incidents had been like to live through. It did not surprise her anymore that Trip occasionally had nightmares, or that they often involved times he had been injured. Of course that worked both ways and Trip now knew intimately what it was like to experience, for example, Trellium withdrawal.

She returned her mind to the job at hand, she was visiting sickbay to consult with Phlox on the dead Bolian. She entered through the double doors, that swished back in anticipation of her arrival. Phlox immediately looked up, although he was currently behind the glass wall of the isolation room. Denobulans had good eyesight, and it was particularly good at spotting movement.

Phlox flicked on a com point with a gloved hand that allowed them to talk whilst he was still inside the isolation room. T’Pol moved closer so that she could observe the Doctor’s work so far. Bright blue blood had drained into the well around the edge of the autopsy table that Phlox had set up and the flesh of the Bolian was a lighter blue in comparison. It was still quite a gory picture that greeted her as she stepped closer to the glass, with the internal organs displayed, and various parts removed from the body for weighing and cataloguing.

“Captain, I have found a couple of points that you might find interesting,” said Phlox.

T’Pol hesitated for just a second before replying, considering the Bolian in front of her a little longer than was necessary.

“I’m sorry, I assumed that you had come to discuss the autopsy,” said Phlox, noticing her distraction. “Was there something else?”

T’Pol found a small irrational sense of anger at Phlox’s insight into her personality tickling her and demanding to be repressed. She had momentarily been thinking about telling him of her telepathic troubles, but now the moment had passed.

“A personal matter that can wait. What did you discover about the Bolian?”

Phlox gave T’Pol a long look, but obviously decided that now was not the time to pursue the matter. “He was definitely killed by an electric shock. A massive one given the damage to his internal organs, however this was not the only injury that he had received recently. He also had several broken ribs.”

“When did he receive these injuries?”

“Certainly prior to his death, it’s hard to say how long before, but no more than a week. They had only just begun to heal. However, it looks as if he had been injured several times in the past. I found evidence of completely healed broken bones and he has numerous scars. It looks as if he has led quite an exciting life.”

“A very dangerous life,” replied T’Pol. “It suggests that he might not be who the Ambassador made him out to be.”

“I doubt he’s been a diplomat all his life certainly. After all you have your fair share of scars and healed broken bones.”

T’Pol inclined her head in agreement. “I doubt that I have as many as this individual,” she pointed out.

Phlox nodded. “It may be worth raising with the Ambassador. If he has just lost his personal guard he may be more willing to open discussions.”

“I shall certainly bear that in mind,” said T’Pol, she was considering a rather different occupation for the man lying on the autopsy table. “Are there any other significant findings?”

“No, that’s it so far, but I’ll be in touch with the full report once I’ve completed the autopsy. Bolian physiology is rather fascinating.”

“That is plenty for the moment, Doctor,” replied T’Pol, glad that she didn’t have to look at the innards of the dead Bolian for any longer.

****

Trip spent the rest of his afternoon and most of the evening searching Cargo Store Three for anything that could possibly have malfunctioned. He found nothing, much like his Engineering staff were finding all over the ship. Everything was functioning normally. Trip finally checked the time and realised that he’d missed dinner completely and it was well past the end of his shift. Strangely T’Pol hadn’t checked in with him, but he guessed she had her own problems with the Bolians. He was tired and hungry, so he called Engineering to let them know that he was going off shift, and headed for the mess hall.

The resequencers were still down, so there was no coffee on tap as there usually was. Instead some large jugs of coffee had been placed out on hot plates on tables. Unfortunately by the time Trip reached the mess hall there was only the dregs left. He poured the last drops into a mug none the less, but it was lukewarm and tasted like it had been stewing for a while. Hopefully it would be just enough to keep him awake until he could get to bed. Food was equally thin on the ground, and with the resequencers down there wasn’t much choice either. It wasn’t unusual for Trip to be one of the last to make it to dinner but usually the kitchen staff had more to work with.

He ended up grabbing a couple of sandwiches and taking them back to the quarters that he shared with T’Pol. He ate at his desk as he went over the usual status reports on his terminal. He was pleased to see that the repairs on Excalibur had gone well and she’d be ready to leave in the morning, slightly ahead of schedule. There was also a preliminary report from Malcolm letting him know that the first part of the phase cannon upgrade was underway. He gave up reading the reports when he realised he couldn’t keep his eyes open for much longer. He finally shut down the terminal, rubbed his eyes and decided that a shower was in order before bed, otherwise T’Pol wouldn’t want to be sleeping in the same bed with him.

He stripped off his dirty uniform, got the shower to the right temperature and stepped under the water. He really needed this after the day that he’d had. Despite only starting at lunchtime, he’d still managed to work a ten hour shift and his muscles were stiff with tension. He let the stress of the day wash away down the plughole. Without really thinking about it, he began to sing in the shower, allowing himself the luxury of relaxing. It was some tacky love song that he’d happened to catch one of the Ensigns in Engineering listening to on their break and had now got stuck in his head.

He was suddenly interrupted by a sharp communication from T’Pol, who was currently sat in Command and Control going over the day’s sensor data. “Please stop. You are out of tune and extremely distracting.”

Trip was amused that T’Pol had even been listening, he’d only been thinking of one thing while he was singing. Love songs, no matter how tacky, always brought to mind his Desert Rose. Then again this sort of stuff didn’t normally bother her, she was usually quite capable of blocking him out. His smile doubled in size as he decided this called for some teasing. “Are you saying you don’t like my singing?”

“Merely that it is poorly executed.”

“Hah, which means that secretly you do like my singing. It’s got to be love.”

“You know that I love you already. Being able to put up with your singing in the shower is not a valid test of my love for you or a prerequisite for a relationship with you. However, in some cultures it could be grounds for separation I believe.”

Trip laughed. T’Pol really did tell actual jokes these days and it amused the hell out of him. “Okay, I’ll keep it down. I’ve nearly finished my shower anyway.” Suddenly he was aware that T’Pol’s thoughts had drifted. She was picturing the two of them in the shower together, naked, and they were kissing. And there was touching. She was running her hands down his wet and soapy body and...

A moment of clarity before he too fell into the beautiful, sensual, daydream made him stop her. “T’Pol, what are you doing?”

She too suddenly realised that she was having a day dream of a very personal nature in the middle of Command and Control. Any distraction in a command situation wasn’t good and Trip knew that T’Pol had allowed herself to become very distracted this time. This was completely against the rules they had agreed for the two of them being in the same chain of command, stationed together.

T’Pol let out a small gasp. “My apologies, I lost focus momentarily.”

Trip was standing under the water, all attempts at washing ceased, his mouth slightly open. “I’ll say.” He took a deep breath and tried to calm himself down as he rinsed the last of the soap out of his hair. He grabbed a towel. “That’s never happened before. Not the entire time that we’ve had this bond. Not unless we wanted it to anyway.”

“I am simply tired,” replied T’Pol.

“You’ve been using that line a lot lately and I don’t buy it. Is there something that you’re not telling me?”

The com sounded in Trip’s quarters. “Engineering to Captain Tucker.”

He ignored it. “Well? Is there?”

T’Pol did not answer and the com sounded again. “Engineering to Captain Tucker, we have an emergency situation, sir.”

“There are many things that I do not tell you,” said T’Pol. “We will speak about this later. For now I suggest you answer the com.”

Trip didn’t know anyone like T’Pol who could go from making him long to get his arms around her body one second, to making him want to get his hands around her neck the next. She was an incredibly frustrating woman. She’d just answered his question and dodged it in the same sentence, and her shields were back in place once more, now more impenetrable than before.

“Tucker to Engineering, go ahead,” said Trip, thumbing the button on the wall with one hand, whilst clamping the towel around his waist with the other hand.

“Captain, we’re detecting surges in the EPS grid. We’ve run all the diagnostics, but we can’t find a cause.”

Trip rested his forehead against the wall beside the com. First fluctuations in the power grid, and now surges. What the hell was going on and why couldn’t it have waited until the morning to happen?

“I’ll be right there,” he replied. He pulled on a clean uniform as quickly as he could, and was on his way to Engineering minutes later. He arrived to find chaos. His efficiently run, model department was currently looking like one of the lower levels of Dante’s hell. Fires had broken out in places and were being put out, people were running in every direction shutting down relays and isolating EPS conduits. Lieutenant Sevak, the only other Vulcan on the station, was currently on watch and Trip found him examining the readings from the cylindrical reactor that sat in the centre of Engineering.

“Report,” said Trip.

“We’ve just started experiencing low level surges in the in EPS grids. So far we’ve managed to keep them contained, but Engineering has experienced some damage. The most logical reason for this would be because we are the area in closest proximity to the reactor. The surges aren’t as powerful elsewhere, so mostly they are a nuisance at the moment rather than posing any danger.”

“What the hell is going on with this damn reactor?” said Trip, almost pushing Sevak aside to take a look at the readings. “Get all non-essential systems taken offline. We may have to shut down the reactor and go onto emergency power, at least until we can figure this out. Who knows, maybe a reset will do the trick. In the meantime, let’s check the control routines.”

“Sir, we’ve got a large surge building,” said an Ensign who was monitoring one of the nearby pressure gauges.

“Where?” asked Trip, urgently.

“F Deck, sections fourteen to sixteen,” someone shouted.

“The Bolians. That’s the guest quarters,” said Trip, immediately opening his mental link to T’Pol and letting her see what was going on. He could transfer information to her far more quickly this way that by using his communicator. “Sound an alert. Evacuate the area.”

A big enough surge in the power grid could result in a blown conduit and with enough energy behind it, there were bombs with less explosive power. T’Pol was already on her way to the area, but he knew that she’d most likely be too late to do anything. The board in front of him told him that more surges were being created around the station and suddenly he felt the floor beneath his feet tremble as the conduit on F deck ruptured.

Trip knew something had to be done, before the other surges building did the same thing, so he took a split second decision. “We’re shutting down the reactor and restarting.”

“Yes, sir,” said Lieutenant Sevak, already moving to his station.

Trip turned around to face the rest of Engineering and began to issue orders. The reactor couldn’t just be switched off, it was a complicated process, but, in an emergency, they had trained to get it safely shut down in less than a minute. Everyone knew what they had to do and where they were supposed to be. Trip himself keyed in the final commands that would shut down the reactor and waited. A couple of seconds passed before the light within the reactor chamber dulled and the lights around him went out.

“Okay, bring her back up,” shouted Trip to the darkened room. Again, they had trained for this. Dealing with controls in the dark was difficult but everyone should know what they were doing and be able to do it in the pitch black. Emergency power, run off large reserve batteries, kicked in a few seconds later, making their task considerably easier.

Trip checked all the diagnostic readouts from the reactor carefully before he eased open the injectors, and the huge reactor sprang to life once more. The glow in the chamber changed from red to yellow to white and blue, indicating rapid increases in temperature. As the reactor hadn’t been allowed to cool down, the return to full power was swift and the lights around engineering returned to full brightness swiftly. Trip examined the data on the panel in front of him and was relieved to see that it looked as if the restart had stopped any further surges building and the reactor hadn’t been damaged by the emergency shut down or restart. Whether this had solved the problem for good was another matter entirely.

Lieutenant Sevak appeared once more beside him, handing him a padd with further data on the reactor restart.

“I want a complete level two diagnostic of all the reactor controller systems,” Trip told Sevak.

“Captain, that will involve taking some systems offline while we perform the diagnostic,” said Sevak. A level two diagnostic was the most invasive procedure that Trip could have ordered, short of taking the whole thing to pieces, but he felt that their recent difficulties merited it.

“I’m aware of that, Lieutenant. Just get it done as quickly as you can. I don’t want to have to tell Captain T’Pol that we have no idea why we just had a surge on F deck.”

“Understood, sir,” replied Sevak.

“And I want a copy of all the controller software code. I need to go through it and see if there’s anything in it that could possibly have caused this.”

“I will have it sent to your terminal,” replied Sevak.

“Thanks. Go on then Lieutenant, you’ve got your orders, let’s get to it.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sevak and began marshalling work parties together to tackle different aspects of the diagnostics that Trip had just ordered.

Finally, alone and looking at the reactor, Trip had a moment to properly seek out T’Pol across their bond.

“Did you get to the Bolians in time?”

“They were able to evacuate in time and, apart from some minor injuries, no one was hurt when the conduit exploded, however considerable damage was done to the guest quarters and hallway.” T’Pol had accompanied her thought to him with a mental picture of the corridor. It was covered in rubble from the ceiling that included large chunks of metal and the black fire retardant material that was used to line the ceiling panels.

“I’ll send someone down to start clearing up and begin repairs,” Trip thought back to her, wearily. He could have done without further repairs on top of everything else that had been going on.

T’Pol was currently once again trying to reassure the Bolian ambassador that he did not need to leave and that everything was really fine. Mim Kathar didn’t seem to believe her entirely and Trip couldn’t blame him for that. With one dead Bolian and a station that was refusing to behave itself, he probably would have thought about chucking in the entire thing if he had been the Bolian Ambassador. He listened in as he organised a team to start repairs.

“Your station is clearly not habitable,” one of the Bolians was saying loudly. “If you are unable to maintain a simple outpost then it seems unlikely that you have the technology required to form an alliance of equals.”

“I can assure you that is not the case,” Trip heard T’Pol reply. “This is simply an unforeseen technical issue that will be resolved shortly.”

Trip closed his eyes and silently apologised to T’Pol that he hadn’t been able to work out what was going on with the reactor. T’Pol just thought back that there was no need for him to apologise, but it didn’t stop him feeling a little inadequate. He was supposed to be good at this stuff. Instead T’Pol was having to continue to try to persuade the Bolians that they should stay on Deep Space One.

“One of my party is dead and you have yet to explain to us how this happened. If it was an accident then it is certainly unsafe here. If it wasn’t then we could be in danger.”

“Captain Archer will be here in less than two days. It would be logical to at least remain here until he arrives. You have come a long way to go back home to your government empty handed. In the mean time, you have been provided with security officers to protect you.”

This seemed to convince the Ambassador. His blue face looked thoughtful, before he nodded his head. “Very well, we will at least remain until Captain Archer arrives, but if we are threatened again then we will not stay any longer.”

With that final pronouncement, Trip decided that sleep was out of the question this evening.

****End of Chapter Three****

“That sensor ghost is back again, sir,” said Ensign Koval, as she handed Trip yet another report padd. He was building up quite a collection of them at his desk in Engineering. He was currently sat going through the reactor controller software, line by line, looking for a bug that could cause their reactor problems. So far there was nothing.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Trip, as he looked at the padd, but of course Koval wasn’t kidding. The Command and Control crew had reported the same sensor malfunction again, and he could have sworn that it had been fixed this time. There was nothing for it, he was going to have to take a look at it himself.

He was running on coffee and adrenaline. It wasn’t a good combination, especially not for someone who wasn’t supposed to be pushing himself. Phlox had suggested before the Excalibur debacle that he might want to step back to part time duty again but Trip wouldn’t even countenance the idea. If he couldn’t pull a full shift with everyone else then he shouldn’t be here.

Trip took the padd from Ensign Koval, adding it to the pile that he already had, put Lieutenant Sevak in charge of Engineering temporarily and left. He made his way towards the forward sensor housing which was pretty much where he expected to find the problem. He rubbed at his tired eyes, trying to read the padd as he walked along and identify the problem. He noted that T’Pol had gone to bed, and was sleeping dreamlessly. As soon as she woke up she’d probably demand that he got some sleep of his own, but for the moment he could get on with some more work.

He rounded a corner and ran slap bang into someone else going the other way. It was very early in the morning, Deep Space One time, so the corridors were almost empty, hence he hadn’t really expected anyone else to be around. Both of them ended up crashing to the ground and their padds went flying. Trip looked up from where he was sprawled on the deck, already feeling a few new bruises, and discovered that it was Malcolm Reed who he had knocked down.

“Sorry, Malcolm, I wasn’t looking where I was going,” said Trip as he collected his padds back up.

Reed was already picking himself up off the floor and collecting his own padds. Trip was sure that he heard him mutter something about “damned yanks” but didn’t press him on it.

“Are you okay?” asked Trip.

“I’m fine.” Reed waved off a helping hand from Trip, but at the same time cradled his already injured arm.

“You’re up early,” said Trip.

“I wanted to get an early start on the phase cannons,” said Reed, but to Trip he had the look of a man who hadn’t slept particularly well and he wondered if Reed was having his own set of nightmare attached to the Kobayashi Maru incident. Or possibly he just wanted to get to the phase cannons before Lieutenant Patterson came on shift.

Reed picked up another padd from the floor, examined the contents to see if it was one of his, before holding it out for Trip to take, only to snatch it back a millisecond later.

“Malcolm, that’s my sensor diagnostics.”

“I can see what it is,” Reed snapped.

“Then what’s so damn interesting?” Trip was getting a little annoyed now. He had a lot of work to do and he didn’t have time to waste with Reed. “It’s just a persistent sensor ghost that’s been causing us a bit of trouble. I thought I’d fixed it but it’s back again. It’s all because I modified the station sensors to penetrate the Romulan jamming field and now T’Pol is blaming me because it isn’t working right. Which pretty much seems to be the story of every damn piece of electronics on this station at the moment.”

Reed held up the padd for Trip to see the screen. “Have you considered that maybe there really is something out there and it isn’t a ghost at all?”

Trip rolled his eyes. “Of course we’ve considered that, but it’s only the sensors that I modified that are picking it up. We’ve scanned that sector with the other arrays and there’s nothing out there. Even Excalibur’s sensors checked it out and there was nothing there.”

“Trip, I’ve seen something like this sensor profile before. It’s not quite right, but it could be a cloaked ship. You said you modified the scanners. Maybe they’re just picking something up that the others can’t detect.”

“Romulans?”

“It’s difficult to tell.”

Trip’s eyes widened and snatched the padd back, quickly tapping through to the schematics of his modifications. “Okay, so instead of trying to fix it, we should be working out how we’re picking up whatever we’re picking up and amplifying it. The best place to do that would be from the Science station in Command and Control.”

Reed nodded in agreement. “I’d suggest we get Excalibur to go out there in any case. Even if it isn’t Romulan that doesn’t mean it isn’t hostile.”

“Still thinking like an Armoury Officer,” said Trip, smiling.

“Is there any other way to think?”

“Not in this corner of the universe,” replied Trip, wishing it wasn’t true. “I’d better wake T’Pol. If this is a potential threat to the station then she needs to know.” Mentally he poked T’Pol across their bond and she stirred a little.

“When did you first notice this “sensor ghost”?” asked Reed as they began to walk towards Command and Control.

“A few weeks ago. It seemed pretty obvious that it was my modification that was causing the problem,” said Trip. “I guess it wasn’t as obvious as we thought.” He could feel T’Pol was awake now and he quickly gave her an overview of what Reed had just told him. T’Pol merely thought back that she was on her way and would meet them in C and C. She hadn’t really had enough sleep but it would be sufficient to keep her going.

“I’m surprised that the Chief Engineer is dealing with sensor malfunctions,” said Reed, conversationally.

“I made the modifications originally and there isn’t really anyone else available. These power problems have mostly been taking up my crew’s time the past couple of days. I’ve been over the reactor half a dozen times with a fine tooth comb. It’s functioning fine, but the power just isn’t being distributed properly. I’ve got half the crew out with EPS flow metres trying to find out where the power is actually going, and the other half checking relays for no good reason other than to rule them out. This is driving me up the wall, Malcolm. I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve got less than no idea how to fix it.”

“Trip, if you don’t know how to fix it then we’re pretty much out of options.”

“I didn’t say I’d given up trying,” replied Trip.

“I should hope not,” said Reed, as he stepped into the turbolift and Trip followed him.

Commander Al-Nasser had Command when they arrived and, after giving him an outline of what they thought was happening, he set about helping them with examining the readings from the so-called sensor ghost more thoroughly. The three of them began fine tuning the sensor’s capability through the science station. T’Pol had always acknowledged that Al-Nasser was fine Science Officer and he was living up to his reputation.

T’Pol stepped in to C and C to discover Al-Nasser sat at the Science Station with both Reed and Tucker looking over his shoulder. Trip noted that she joined them without a second thought, her curiosity piqued.

“What have you found?” she asked.

“We’ve examined the sensor data and it seems that the sensor array that Captain Tucker modified is definitely picking up something. We’re trying to increase the power of the scanners and isolate the frequency that it’s detecting so that we can get a clearer picture of what’s out there.”

“When I modified the array I increased the range of frequencies that the sensors could detect. I think we’re picking something up that the other sensors can’t detect which is why it looks like a ghost and we haven’t been able to verify that it’s there.”

“It’s looking more and more like a cloaked ship, the more data we get,” said Reed. “Judging by this, it’s also some distance out.”

“Agreed,” said T’Pol. “Ensign Angeloni, hail Excalibur.” She had registered Reed’s suggestion that they send out Excalibur from Trip’s earlier communication with her and was now going to act on it.

“Yes, Ma’am.” Ensign Angeloni hailed the ship. Captain Street appeared on the main screen.

“Captain T’Pol, we’re just doing the final checks and should be able to get underway later today,” said Street.

“I am glad to hear that Captain, but we need you to leave rather sooner than that. We have a sensor contact on long range scanners that could be a cloaked ship.”

Captain Street sat up slightly straighter in her chair. “Have you identified it?”

“No, we are not even currently sure that it’s really there,” said T’Pol.

“But you want to be sure,” said Street in understanding.

“We need confirmation,” said T’Pol.

Street issued orders to someone off screen, asked questions and got replies. “We can be underway in an hour. Send through everything that you have to my Science Officer.”

“I will see to it,” replied T’Pol. “Good hunting, Captain.”

Street smiled at T’Pol. “We’ll let you know when we’re ready to head out. Excalibur out.” The screen went blank.

“We have done everything that we can for now,” said T’Pol.

Trip looked over at Reed, and breathed out slowly. Neither of them were good at waiting, but T’Pol was right.

Lieutenant Patterson stepped into C and C, brandishing a data chip. “Ma’am, I’ve got the Security footage from Trell Chev’s last few moments. I think you’ll want to see this.”

“It can’t have taken this long to find and view a few minutes of security footage,” said Reed.

“It does when it’s been corrupted by the power problems. I’ve spent the last few hours running a program to reconstitute it in a form that I can watch,” replied Patterson, annoyed once more.

“Put it on the main screen, Lieutenant,” said T’Pol.

Patterson handed the data chip to the Ensign at the coms station who transferred the images to the main screen. A slightly blurry image appeared on the screen, that occasionally turned into large blocks of digital artefacts. They could see Trell Chev standing at the doorway of the Ambassador’s quarters. Suddenly it seemed that he heard a noise; he turned his head sharply and then went to a com point. He spoke into the com point for a couple of seconds and then moved off purposefully down the corridor.

As far as Trip was concerned, this was bizarre behaviour, not least because he knew for a fact that the com points didn’t work. It was why everyone carried their communicators with them at all times and used them as the primary means of communication.

“He’s talking into a broken com point,” said Trip. “Something’s not right with this picture.”

“Ensign Angeloni, I need the com logs from yesterday 1500 hours to 1600 hours,” said T’Pol.

“That’s quite a lot of traffic,” said the Ensign, replacing the image of the empty corridor in which Trell Chev had once stood with a list of all messages logged between 1500 and 1600 hours the previous day.

“Confine your search to deck F traffic,” said T’Pol.

The Ensign isolated a single message. “I think this is what you’re looking for.”

“Play it, please,” said T’Pol.

“Captain T’Pol to Bolian Delegation,” came the surprising message. T’Pol raised an eyebrow.

“This is Trell Chev of the Bolians, go ahead Captain.”

“Please report to Cargo Store Three. There is something here that needs your immediate attention.”

“Very well, I’ll be there as soon as I can. Trell Chev out.”

It was obvious that this was the point where Trell Chev had walked out of the camera’s view.

“I did not make that call,” said T’Pol.

“No, but if we tell the Bolians then they’re going to think that you did,” said Patterson.

“I’d say you’re being framed, Captain,” added Trip. “Or the Federation is at any rate.”

“This information cannot leave this room if we want to continue our talks with the Bolians,” said Al-Nasser.

“On the contrary, Commander, I believe we must be totally open with the Bolians if we want to form an alliance with them. If they later discover that we have withheld information then that could be very damaging to our future relationship. We need to discover how this was done,” said T’Pol.

Trip was on his way to the Communications Station before T’Pol had finished her sentence.

“Tapping in to the com network’s the hard bit,” said Trip, as Ensign Angeloni moved aside to let Trip get under her station. He was looking for anything that could have been placed on the station and used as a relay. He detached the maintenance panel and pulled out a penlight so that he could get a better view of the wiring inside.

“Trip’s right,” said Reed. “Starfleet com systems are very secure. They use encrypted frequencies to make listening in hard and it would be even harder to insert a message into the system, without some physical presence.”

“What about the message itself?” asked Patterson.

Al-Nasser answered. “All they’d need was a recording of the Captain’s voice and they could probably synthesize what they needed. They might have taken sounds from several different messages in order to get their finished product.”

“The message was simple,” said T’Pol. “At no point did it mention any names or other factors specific to Trell Chev. However perhaps the text would benefit from further analysis.”

“I’ll see to it,” said Al-Nasser.

“This is clean,” said Trip, emerging from underneath the Coms Station console. “No bugs, no relays, nada. If they’re doing it this way, then the bug is somewhere else.”

“I’ll conduct a security sweep of the system,” said Patterson.

“You’re all ignoring what this means,” said Reed. “Someone lured that Bolian into the Cargo Store and killed him.”

“I am not ignoring anything,” said T’Pol, “I am simply dealing with our problems in order.”

“Sorry, Captain, but it seems to me the fact that he was murdered is rather important.”

“Perhaps more than you are aware,” said T’Pol. “It is my belief that Trell Chev was a member of the Bolian Intelligence community.”

“He was a spy?” asked Trip in disbelief.

T’Pol nodded. “It seems highly likely.”

“Which gives the Federation an even better motive to have him killed,” said Reed. “This is not good.”

“That’s an understatement,” commented Trip.

“Then we need to find who is responsible as quickly as possible,” said T’Pol.

The Com Station beeped. Ensign Angeloni answered the call. “Ma’am, Captain Street sends her regards. Excalibur is ready to depart.”

“They are cleared to depart,” said T’Pol.

“Excalibur you are cleared to depart,” said Angeloni. T’Pol brought up the image of Excalibur as the docking clamps withdrew, umbilical cords were released and finally the ship pulled slowly away from the station.

“I’ve got phase cannons to work on,” said Reed, rapidly exiting Command and Control.

Trip realised that perhaps this was a rather emotional moment for Reed. He was, after all, Excalibur’s Second in Command, and, even though it was only a week-long shake down cruise, it probably hurt to see his ship leave without him.

“He seemed in rather a hurry,” said Patterson.

T’Pol had raised an eyebrow at his quick exit but once Trip had explained, they had both agreed that it was best just to let him get it out of his system. She did not comment further on it.

“How long before Excalibur reaches the target?” asked T’Pol.

Al-Nasser checked his display. “About five hours.”

The lights flickered and Trip looked up at the ceiling. “I thought I had that fixed.” He’d forlornly hoped that the shutdown and restart would have purged the systems of whatever bug was causing the anomaly but apparently it hadn’t.

“I’ll be in Engineering.”

He hadn’t finished going over the reactor controller software and it was looking more and more like that was where the problem lay.

“Perhaps an additional perspective on the problem would help,” said T’Pol.

Trip smiled. Even given the circumstances he’d give anything to spend more time with T’Pol and he told her so telepathically. “I’ll take any help I can get,” he said for the benefit of those in the room.

“Commander Al-Nasser, you have Command. Let me know if you or Lieutenant Patterson find anything,” said T’Pol. “Captain Tucker and I will be in Science Lab Five.”

“Why are we going to the Science Lab?” asked Trip.

“Because it is considerably easier to examine computer code on a large screen,” said T’Pol. She added to him alone “especially when you have tired eyes.”

“Okay, we’ll be in the Science Lab,” said Trip as the two of them left Command and Control. Being the gentleman that he was, he let T’Pol take the lead and it had nothing to do with how tired he felt.

****

Trip sat looking at lines of code on a screen again and they were beginning to blur together. He was starting to have trouble keeping his eyes open again, despite several cups of coffee. T’Pol had looked more and more disapproving at each one, and he could hear her underlying current of concern across their bond. She was trying not to be overly protective however and was doing a reasonable job of pushing her concerns aside so that they could get on with the job.

They had been running simulations of the reactor control software and then identifying where the bugs were by seeing where the glitches occurred in the simulation. The only problem was that every time they ran the simulation, something new failed. When they broke it right down to the code, everything looked exactly as it should.

Another line of code scrolled past. T’Pol’s vast expertise in computers was proving very useful and Trip loved the way that she was willing to share her knowledge though their bond, but he just couldn’t see anything wrong.

“T’Pol, there’s nothing here, all these lines of code are fine. There’s no corruption, no misplaced lines of code, nothing missing, everything looks fine,” said Trip.

The lights flickered again.

He looked up at the ceiling crossly. “Yeah, go on, taunt me.”

“Perhaps we should take a break,” said T’Pol. “Maybe if you were to get some sleep, you would be able to return to the problem well rested and perhaps see something new.”

Trip closed his eyes and rubbed them. He opened them to take one last look at the code before following T’Pol’s advice. The screen flickered and something that looked like lightening crawled across the code. Several lines of code disappeared where the lightening walked. A few milliseconds later the code reappeared.

“What the hell was that?” asked Trip, suddenly awake again. It had been so quick that he was wondering if it was his imagination.

T’Pol looked up from the padd that she had been working on. “What are you talking about?”

Trip showed T’Pol exactly what he’d seen by sending her a mental image. She still didn’t exactly believe him, citing his extreme tiredness.

“It’s a goddamn computer virus, it has to be,” said Trip. “It’s been deleting and replacing lines of code which is why we’ve never been able to detect it. Every time we look at a line of code it’s there, but when the computer goes to run the program bits of it are missing and it’s screwing with the reactor. We’re just lucky that it hasn’t deleted anything serious.”

“I will run the change log,” said T’Pol. In theory the change log would have made a record of any deletions and replacements. It was standard operating procedure for all programs and automated in most cases. T’Pol brought up the change log on the screen and it was obvious that something was wrong, there were far too many entries and they kept being added to.

“It shouldn’t be able to do this,” said Trip. “We’re supposed to be running a secure system. I’ll be having some choice words with the software maintenance team.”

“The more important question is where it came from,” said T’Pol.

“It could have been hiding in our system for weeks, anyone could have brought it in,” said Trip. “I’m less concerned with how it got here than how we get rid of it. Obviously the reactor shut down didn’t work or it would be gone now and we’d be none the wiser.”

Of course just as Trip had been about to argue his case the static on their link returned. Trip just gave T’Pol a look, about to launch into a series of questions as to why this was happening.

“Now is not the time,” said T’Pol.

“Exactly when are we going to discuss this, T’Pol? We both know that something is wrong, and you’ve got a hell of a lot more experience with these things than I have.”

“We agreed when you were posted to Deep Space One that our relationship would not affect our work. We should not be discussing it whilst we are on duty.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, we haven’t had much in the way of off duty time lately. Taking ten minutes out of this shift, that I’m not even supposed to be working, isn’t going to make much difference to my day. If you know what’s wrong then I think I have a right to know.”

Trip stared into T’Pol’s eyes and was slightly alarmed by what he found there. If he didn’t know better then he would have thought that she was scared. Once again her mental shields were up and he didn’t know what was going on in her head.

“T’Pol, what’s the matter?”

T’Pol was visibly having trouble keeping her emotions in check. “As you have correctly surmised, something is causing difficulties with our telepathic bond. I am unsure as to what this might be, but the most likely cause is some sort of mental defect in one of us. As I am the telepath in the partnership it is probable that I am the source of the difficulties that we are experiencing.”

“Are you sure about this?” asked Trip. “As far as we know there’s never been a human-Vulcan bond before. We’re in unknown territory.”

“All my research to date indicates that this is the most likely cause. Given my history of neurological health it seems obvious that I am the one causing the problem,” said T’Pol.

“How do you work that one out? I’m the one that’s part Lyssarian desert larva, and I’ve hit my head more times than I care to count. Is this what’s been stopping you sleeping?”

“In part,” replied T’Pol.

“Yeah, a large part,” said Trip. He could still easily detect when T’Pol wasn’t giving him the whole truth, even with their bond functioning less well.

“I don’t know what I would do if our bond was to fail. It has become an important facet of our relationship and perhaps we would not have this relationship without it.” Unspoken was the underlying worry that Trip really only loved her for the bond and not her for herself.

“For someone as smart as you are, you can be pretty dumb sometimes. The bond is not our relationship, T’Pol. The relationship is us, you and me, working and being together. I won’t say that the bond isn’t great, it is. It’s great knowing how you’re doing and what you’re thinking, but if it wasn’t here, I wouldn’t love you any less.” He held out his fingers in the Vulcan gesture of affection. It was something that he very rarely initiated, he knew that T’Pol valued her personal space, but he felt she needed the reassurance. T’Pol extended her own fingers in reply and they touched. Trip felt a frisson of affection and love as they made contact, and he allowed it to wash pleasantly over him for a few moments, returning it in equal measure, before they broke contact.

“So what do we do next?” asked Trip. T’Pol seemed to have regained her former steely emotional control and was looking more herself again.

“I suggest we pay a visit to Doctor Phlox,” said T’Pol. “He should be able to confirm my suspicions or suggest alternative possibilities.”

Trip nodded. “Well there’s no point worrying about it, until we’ve actually got something to worry about. Come on, let’s go and see if Phlox can fit us in.”

“We are on duty,” said T’Pol, turning back to her work.

“T’Pol, this is definitely beginning to affect our work, we’d be better off getting this sorted out. Besides, you’re the Captain of this station and I’m the Chief Engineer, who’s going to stop us?”

Trip practically dragged T’Pol off her chair and to the door of the Science Lab. He thumbed the door opener but nothing happened.

“Huh,” said Trip, looking a little perplexed as he hit the door opener again, a little harder this time. The doors refused to open. The screens behind them suddenly went blank and then Trip noticed that an important hum, that was usually the background noise everywhere he went on the station, was missing. The air-conditioning had stopped working. If they’d been on a planet this would have been a minor inconvenience, on a space station it was potentially a death sentence. With the room sealed and no air being pumped into it, they would run out of air eventually, although it would probably take several hours.

The static immediately disappeared from their bond and Trip suddenly found that their link was once more as clear as crystal. Trip quickly communicated to T’Pol his observations of the situation, which ended in “someone is trying to kill us.”

T’Pol was calculating how long before they ran out of air and had so far come up with a fairly accurate figure of twelve hours and thirty four minutes. “It would seem a rather laborious way to try to kill us,” she thought back to him. However, to make Trip’s point for him, the air-conditioning suddenly went into reverse, sucking the air out of the room. This was a system that was used to put out fires on the station, removing the oxygen from a room was a very rapid way to extinguish a fire, but it was an equally rapid way to extinguish life.

Trip exchanged an alarmed look with T’Pol, his thoughts moved quickly. “I’ll work on trying to get the door open. You try to block the vents.”

T’Pol had already begun moving to find something, before Trip had even finished the thought. Her calculations were revising down and she was now estimating minutes rather than hours. Trip tore off the casing to the panel that held the door control circuits and began splicing wires together.

As T’Pol searched she pulled out her communicator from her top pocket. “T’Pol to C and C. Emergency, Science Lab Five. Air is being evacuated from the room and Captain Tucker and I are locked in.” Trip noted that T’Pol sounded as calm as ever.

“Captain,” came Al-Nasser’s voice. “Are you okay?”

“For the moment,” said T’Pol. “However we do not have long before the air in the room is completely removed and so far we have been unable to stop it.”

“I’ve despatched a team with a cutting torch to work on the door. We’ll have you out of there as soon as we can.”

“Understood, T’Pol out.” She found a piece of metal sheeting that was waiting to be turned into a desk top, and held it up against one of the vents. It was immediately sucked up against the vent. She was at a loss to find anything else however and she communicated this to Trip. “I have slowed the air evacuation but we still don’t have much time.”

Trip was beginning to find it was getting harder to breathe. The air was thinning and he was feeling his diminished lung capacity. The scarring on his lung tissue meant that his lungs were much less efficient at taking in air than was usual. Under normal circumstances he was fine, after all the body could function perfectly well on one lung so having two scarred lungs wasn’t that different, but this wasn’t an everyday circumstance that he now found himself in.

He swore as a couple of wires sparked and burnt the end of his fingers. He withdrew his hand with a jerk. “That shouldn’t have happened.” Trip pulled the wires apart again and tried once again to reroute the power. A spark that looked like a miniature piece of lighting ran towards Trip’s fingers and he pulled his hand back just in time. “What the hell…?”

T’Pol appeared beside him and quickly assessed what he was trying to do, borrowing his thoughts as she did so. Trip thought back to her. “I’m beginning to think that this is personal.”

He tried a third time to connect the wires that he needed, and once again had to remove his hand before a small length of electric blue lightening clawed its way across the wiring.

“Fascinating,” said T’Pol.

Trip let her know what he thought of that sentiment with a few well chosen thoughts. None of them were particularly polite.

“If this is a computer virus, I have never seen one like it before,” replied T’Pol, across their bond, ignoring her mate’s bad language. She took out her scanner and began examining the tiny electrical sparks as they ran around the circuits that Trip had been working on.

They heard the sound of the crew outside beginning to cut into the door. Trip sucked in thin air and once more attempted to connect the wires that he needed to in order to open the door. Once again the wires sparked and he withdrew his hand as a small fire started. T’Pol swiftly put out the flames with a nearby extinguisher. Trip examined the ruins of the circuits.

His thoughts were bleak as he turned to T’Pol. “I’ve got nothing to work with here, t’hy’la. There’s nothing I can do.”

“The door will be opened shortly by the cutting torch,” replied T’Pol.

“Shortly isn’t going to be soon enough.” He was now finding it much harder to get enough air, whereas T’Pol still seemed to be breathing easily. “Why is it that I’m gasping and you’re still doing fine?”

“My Vulcan heritage means that I can survive in areas of much less oxygen. Many of my ancestors lived at high altitudes. Your previous injuries are no doubt also playing a part.” T’Pol gave him the closest thing to a concerned look that it was possible for a Vulcan to give.

Trip felt a little dizzy now, and his head was killing him. He was finding it impossible to think straight and he leaned against the wall, using it to support him as he slid to the ground. “Damn it, this is isn’t how I wanted to go. There has to be something else we can do.” Each breath was a chore now and the panic was beginning to set in, he couldn’t help it. This was all getting rather too close to his memories of “The Incident”, and struggling to breathe. “The Incident” was how he and T’Pol referred to his attempt to blow himself up, after all he couldn’t really term it an accident when he’d intended to do it, even if it was to take some bad guys with him.

T’Pol sat down opposite him, her legs crossed. He felt her worm her way into his head, even as he was struggling to get enough oxygen. He wasn’t actively blocking her but he didnn’t really wanting her to see his head like this.

She caught him in a soul-piercing stare. “Listen to me. We need to meditate together – I can help you slow your breathing and heart rate so that we can survive long enough for the door to be cut open.”

Trip shook his head. “I’m not a Vulcan and I’ve never been very good at the whole meditating thing.”

He heard T’Pol’s next words reverberate in his mind. “We can do this together.” And she took his hand in her own and began to transmit calm, clear thoughts and instructions. “Close your eyes. Listen to my breathing and feel my heart beat,” she placed his hand on her chest. “Now, try to match it. I will do the rest.”

Trip shut his eyes, but his breathing was now in pained breaths as the air was withdrawn, and he couldn’t even concentrate enough to use their bond properly. “T’Pol, I can’t.” Suddenly it was as if he felt a mental slap on the face.

“You are not going to give up,” the voice in his mind told him in no uncertain terms. “Concentrate and slow your breathing.”

He couldn’t disobey that tone, so he did as he was told and it was as if the world slowed down around him. He breathed only when T’Pol did and it was like she was hanging onto him and stopping him from falling over a cliff. It seemed an age between breaths, and there was an agonising gap between each, an eternity of trying to catch his breath. Finally he couldn’t hang on any longer and dropped into unconsciousness.

****End of Chapter Four****

Someone was shaking him with a hand on his shoulder. He blinked in the light and realised that an oxygen mask had been placed over his face. He was now sat in the corridor, leaning against the wall. People bustled around him, some of them his engineers, and a group of officers stood discussing the situation.

“T’Pol?” he asked suddenly worried that he couldn’t see her. He tried to stand but he was dizzy and his legs wouldn’t cooperate.

Phlox was at his side. “Hold it, you’re still a little hypoxic. You need oxygen.”

T’Pol crouched down in front of him. It had been like flicking a switch when he returned to consciousness, he knew from experience, and she had dropped what she had been doing to come to him. He was unbelievably pleased to see that she was fine and he favoured her with his best grin.

“How are you feeling?” asked T’Pol.

“My head hurts,” said Trip, “but apart from that I feel fine.” The mask muffled his voice.

“Your lips are still blue,” said T’Pol, an undercurrent of worry colouring her statement.

“Not for much longer,” said Phlox. “His colour should return shortly. The headache might take a little longer to dissipate. This should help.” Phlox discharged a hypospray into Trip’s neck.

Trip looked at T’Pol and pulled down the oxygen mask. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but how did we just survive that?”

“A Vulcan meditative trance to slow our metabolism,” replied T’Pol, as if it was something that she did everyday. “I linked our minds together to buy us more time.”

“It worked,” said Phlox. “You were able to survive in a room with very little air until Commander Al-Nasser could get the door open.” He replaced the oxygen mask over Trip’s nose and mouth. “Keep that on for a bit longer. With your medical history, I’m not taking any chances.”

Trip just sighed. “I’m fine.” His voice was muffled again and he was beginning to register just how uncomfortable the oxygen mask was as he started to feel better. “Did you tell them what we found?”

T’Pol nodded. “I explained your theory that we have a computer virus in our systems.”

“It’s more than that, T’Pol. That thing was learning.” He pulled down the mask once more. “It locked us in and turned off the air, but that wasn’t enough to kill us, so it started sucking out the air. I started hacking the lock so it burnt out the circuits.”

Phlox replaced the mask on Trip’s face again. “Keep it on for the moment, please.”

Trip rolled his eyes. “How long do I have to keep this on?”

“Until your blood oxygen levels are back to normal,” said Phlox, examining his scanner’s readings.

“Great,” said Trip, leaning back against the wall. “How long is that going to take?”

“A few minutes.”

“Patience,” thought T’Pol to him.

“Easy for you to say,” Trip thought back.

“I was not unconscious when they found us, t’hy’la,” T’Pol transmitted.

Malcolm came into Trip’s line of sight, and crouched down on one knee beside him and T’Pol. “I heard what happened. Are you both okay?”

“We are both fine,” said T’Pol.

Trip just gave him a tired wave.

“Do you know what caused the malfunction?” asked Reed.

“Captain Tucker has a theory,” replied T’Pol. A quick look and exchange of telepathic information told T’Pol that he was not in the mood to get shouted at by Phlox again for removing his mask so she filled in for him. “He believes we are dealing with a sophisticated adaptive computer virus. We discovered that it was deleting and rewriting lines of code in the reactor control software.”

“That would make some sense actually,” said Reed. “It would certainly explain the power problems, the resequencer malfunctions and, possibly, our dead Bolian.”

“How do you work that one out?” asked Trip, through the mask, unable to contain his curiosity.

“Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence that we have power problems the moment the Bolians arrive? They haven’t exactly been forthcoming about what made them arrive early either, and their radio wasn’t working. Perhaps they didn’t have a choice but to speed up, maybe their engine control programs had been compromised. Besides, I’ve never encountered an engine problem that Mister Tucker here couldn’t diagnose in less than a day.”

“So you’re saying that someone put the virus on the Bolian ship and they brought it here?” asked Trip.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” said Reed. “Which would mean that the Bolians were the original target of whoever created this virus.”

“That still doesn’t tell us who placed the virus on the Bolian ship,” said T’Pol.

Trip telepathically indicated that T’Pol might want to consider the sensor ghost that Excalibur had been sent to investigate.

“Yes,” T’Pol replied, aloud, “but we still don’t know who that ship belongs to.”

“Did he just suggest that whoever it is stuck around to watch?”

“Yes, the sensor ghost,” said T’Pol.

Trip suddenly ripped off the oxygen mask, a horrible realisation making itself known.

“Captain, please…” began Phlox but Trip just ignored him.

“God damn it! Why didn’t I catch on to this before? We’ve got to recall Excalibur now.”

“The virus?” asked Reed. Trip nodded fiercely.

T’Pol was already pulling out her communicator by this point, so that she could contact C and C. Trip had communicated the details to her in a concerned and annoyed blast of emotion before he had finished his first exclamation. She began a muted conversation with Ensign Angeloni in C and C.

“The Bolians gave it to us and we probably gave it to Excalibur. It’s like the god damned plague for electrical systems, and I just finished fixing the damn thing. Why didn’t I spot this sooner?”

“We didn’t have all the facts,” Reed pointed out.

“I should have realised when nothing worked right,” said Trip. “It could only be a computer virus affecting this many systems.”

T’Pol closed her communicator. “Excalibur is not answering hails.”

Commander Reed swore. “I should be there. They’ll need their Tactical Officer.”

Trip didn’t point out Reed’s slip up, Excalibur had a perfectly good Tactical Officer on board, it was their First Officer that they would be missing. Even given the situation, he couldn’t help but be amused that Malcolm continued to think of himself as a Tactical Officer even when he wasn’t.

“I have placed the station under quarantine until we can determine how to rid our systems of the virus,” said T’Pol.

“How’re my oxygen levels?” Trip asked Phlox.

“Nearly back to normal,” said Phlox, “but if you could just give it few more minutes.”

Trip shook his head. “I’ve got work to do. We’ve got to hunt down this virus and work out how to purge it from our systems. Then we can work out how to tell Excalibur to do the same.”

Reed nodded, getting to his feet. “Do you need a hand?”

“I’ll take any help I can get. Someone had better talk to the Bolians,” said Trip.

“I believe that duty should fall to me,” said T’Pol, somewhat resignedly.

“Perhaps I’d better come with you. Having a technical perspective on any lies they spin us might come in handy. Just let me get the software guys on tracking down this virus.”

“Very well, I will check in with Lieutenant Patterson and see whether she has gathered any further information.” He noted that T’Pol was gratified to have the extra moral support and she was hoping that the authority he would provide would help her get to the bottom of things. She definitely approved of his suggestion even if outwardly she had met his idea with a neutral reaction.

“I’ll check the database to see if anyone else has ever come across something like this,” said Reed.

“Good idea, Malcolm. Let us know if you find anything, and watch your step.”

“Don’t I always?” said Reed.

Trip just gave a snort in reply and pushed himself up from the floor, using the wall to help support himself. He still felt a little dizzy and he felt T’Pol place an unobtrusive hand under his elbow to steady him. Reed had also positioned himself to be ready to catch Trip in case he fell forwards. They both knew him too well not to see when he was being less than honest about his state of health. He hoped that Phlox hadn’t noticed, but suspected it was a futile hope.

“This is all against my advice, Captain,” Phlox reminded him, making it clear that he had taken in everything. “But if you’re going to ignore me then I must insist that you come to sickbay for a follow-up check this afternoon and alert me if you experience any further symptoms.”

“Will do, Doc,” said Trip, pulling off the oxygen mask and handing it to the Denobulan. He took out his communicator and contacted the software team leader in Engineering, a Lieutenant Armitage. He gave in to his recent frustration and decided that the Lieutenant needed a good talking to for having let this slip through the net.

“Captain Tucker to Lieutenant Armitage.”

“Armitage here, sir. Go ahead.”

“Lieutenant, Captain T’Pol and I just nearly lost our lives to an air conditioning system malfunction because we’ve got a computer virus loose on DS1. I want to know how the hell this virus was able to get into our system, why it wasn’t detected immediately and how we can get rid of it. Last one first. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” replied the Lieutenant. “I’m really not sure how this happened. All our security is up to date.”

“I’m not interested in excuses, we’ll pick apart what went wrong later, I just want it gone. Contact me as soon as you have something.” Trip snapped shut the communicator with some force. He rubbed his eyes and wondered if being unconscious due to lack of oxygen counted as sleep. “Come on then, let’s get this over with,” he thought to T’Pol. However, he could hear in his mind the edge of static once more creeping into their bond and making it difficult for him to pick up T’Pol’s more subtle thoughts.

She gave him a curt nod in reply, indicating that she too was finding it difficult to communicate across their bond. Trip gave a sigh, well aware that they would have to put their personal medical problems on hold for the moment. They went to find the Bolians.

****

The Bolians had been re-housed in temporary quarters while the guest quarters were being repaired. There were two security guards outside the door to the suite and another two further down the hallways on either side. To all intents and purposes the Bolians had been placed under house arrest. They were obviously not entirely pleased about this and their faces were set in dour expressions before T’Pol even opened her mouth to confront them with her knowledge of the virus. Mim Kathar looked particularly grim.

“Your hospitality is decidedly lacking, Captain,” said Kathar. “When will Admiral Archer arrive?”

“Most likely tomorrow,” said T’Pol. “That is not why I have come to speak with you. We have discovered that our computer has been infected with a virus. It seems most likely that your ship was infected and you transferred it to the station when you docked. We need any information that you have about this virus.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Kathar.

“Time is short, Ambassador. The virus seems to still be learning about our systems but as soon as it has what it needs it will no doubt attempt to kill you and your party. Trell Chev’s death seems to have merely been the opening salvo.”

“I find it hard to believe that Trell Chev was killed by a computer virus,” replied Kathar.

T’Pol indicated that Trip should enter the conversation at this point. She needed his engineering expertise to add weight to their arguments.

“Computer viruses can be deadly on a station like this one. All that virus needs to do is cut the power and we’d be living on borrowed time. Look, we know that your ship brought in the virus, I just need to know everything that you can tell us about how to stop it.”

Kathar remained silent.

“Your ship’s radio was obviously broken when you arrived, and you arrived well ahead of schedule. It’s kind of like you were running from something. How do you explain that?” Trip asked.

“We were not running from anything,” replied Kathar.

“Your continued obfuscation is unproductive,” said T’Pol.

“You misunderstand me, Captain,” said Kathar. “We were running to Deep Space One because we expected to find Admiral Archer here.”

“Admiral Archer? Why? You were aware that this is not his command.”

“Of course we were aware. I have misled you somewhat about our mission here. I am not an Ambassador. I am a member of the Bolian Secret Service, as was Trell Chev and the rest of my party. We have come to you to seek asylum. We have information that could be of use to the Federation, on Bolarus and its neighbours, and the current Bolian regime is not to our tastes.”

“What happened to the real Ambassador?” asked Trip, somewhat dumbfounded.

“There never was a real Ambassador or a treaty. We fabricated messages from our government to set up this meeting.”

“I still don’t see why you wanted to see Admiral Archer. You could have told all of this to us,” said Trip.

“Many years ago, Captain Archer, as he was then, and I met. I was already planning my defection but had not yet summoned up the courage to leave. I mentioned my intentions to him and he told me to contact him when I was ready. I knew I could trust him to be discreet. I sent him a message a few weeks ago to meet us here so that he could negotiate the terms of my defection. Obviously he didn’t receive it.”

“Obviously not,” said T’Pol.

“No, but I think someone else did,” said Trip, thinking about the sensor ghost. T’Pol was nodding in agreement having had similar thoughts herself. “Which means that the ship sitting out there is probably Bolian and they’re not too happy with you.”

“Ship?” asked Kathar, looking alarmed.

“We picked up a cloaked ship on long range scans,” said Trip.

“It is most likely that they are waiting for some sort of confirmation of your deaths,” said T’Pol.

Mim Kathar and the other Bolians looked rather alarmed.

“My guess would be that your government has known about your plan to defect for a long time and they made sure that they could stop you. I bet when you take a look at your databanks you’ll find out that they’re corrupted. You must have some damn good information if they’re going to this much trouble.” Trip was angry, plain and simple. The Bolians had put everyone on Deep Space One in danger with their secrecy.

“I have worked in intelligence for many years and am a senior official. My departure is not only a material loss to them but would also cause the government to lose face in a way that they cannot afford.”

T’Pol was also counting the cost of the Bolians’ actions. “The Federation may wish to ask Bolarus to join in the future. By taking you and the rest of your party in we could be jeopardising our good relations with Bolarus for many years to come.”

Trip sighed. “Great so we’re in the middle of an intergalactic diplomatic incident.”

“The information that I have is worth it, but this is why I must speak to Admiral Archer in person. I would not trust subspace communication to be secure.”

“You still haven’t told us what you know about the virus,” said Trip.

“Very little,” said Kathar. “I was under the impression that the radio had simply malfunctioned.”

“But I thought you increased speed to get here because you detected the virus, or were having engine trouble or something.”

“No, we simply had to move up the timing of our plan. We thought we had been discovered and it seems that we were correct.”

“So you really know nothing about this virus?”

“I said I knew very little, but perhaps if you were to let me examine it, I might be of some help.”

Trip exchanged a few quick telepathic comments with T’Pol. She didn’t want to trust the Bolian, after all he had done nothing but lie to them, but Trip pointed out that they didn’t have much choice. T’Pol had to agree, if rather grudgingly, that he was right.

“Very well, we should work together to find a way of dealing with this virus.”

“The best place to do that is in Engineering,” said Trip.

Mim Kathar nodded. “Lead the way.”

****

Trip cleared out a corner of Engineering for them to work in. The three of them gathered around a screen and were joined by Lieutenant Armitage a few moments later. She had brought across her latest findings on the virus, but she had only been able to find the slightest traces of its presence. The virus was obviously designed to hide its own tracks.

“I don’t see anything,” said Mim Kathar.

“Wait for it,” said Trip, as they looked at the lines of code on the screen.

Lieutenant Sevak came over to the group. “Captain Tucker, I’ve been getting reports of minor failures across the station. The turbolifts are the latest malfunction, but the transporter is also down. We have a report of two crewmembers trapped between floors. A rescue crew has been dispatched.”

Trip took the padd that the Vulcan offered him, scrolling down the long list of problems. “This is not good. It’s like it’s going through every single system on the station trying to figure out what each one does. I’ve never seen a virus like this before. It’s smart.”

“The pertinent question would appear to be “how smart is it?”,” said T’Pol.

“Does it matter? This thing is eating our systems.”

“The level of intelligence that we are dealing with could be quite important,” said T’Pol.

Trip was framing a reply, when he noticed that Commander Reed had entered Engineering. Reed had a padd tucked into his sling and another one in his hand. He saw Trip and made his way across the reactor room.

“I found a couple of things that I thought might be of interest,” said Reed, handing Trip yet another padd. “Starfleet Security keeps an eye on computer viruses that are out there to make sure that we’re as up to date on our virus protection as we can be. There’s been a rumour circulating the Federation intelligence community about a sentient computer virus.”

“Sentient?” asked Trip. “As in alive?”

“That would depend on your definition of life,” said T’Pol.

“Perhaps we can leave that debate for another time. All the rumours say that this virus is a high level intelligence and it’s main function is assassination. It’s what governments employ to take out people that they don’t like.”

“I have also heard of such a being,” said Kathar. “It calls itself Cutter.”

“And why didn’t you mention this?” asked Trip, crossing his arms over his chest.

“I didn’t want to give you false information, this virus might have been something else,” said Kathar. “I needed to see the code to be sure.”

“Great, so how do we deal with it?” asked Trip. The lights flickered.

“I have never heard of Cutter failing to carry out its task,” said Mim Kathar.

The lights flickered again for a longer period this time.

“That is really pissing me off,” said Trip, angrily.

“If this virus is sentient, then it can probably hear everything that we’re saying by using the com system,” pointed out Reed.

Which was when the lights went out completely and the station was plunged into complete darkness. All sound ceased momentarily, as the reactor shut down, followed shortly by the air system. For a split second there was perfect silence as everyone was stunned by the shut down.

“Sevak, emergency procedures,” Trip shouted in the direction of the Vulcan engineer, as he felt along the wall for the nearest emergency flashlight and turned it on.

“Yes, sir,” replied Sevak. He began issuing orders to the engineers around the room, many of whom had also now found flashlights and were investigating dead systems.

An ominous laugh filled the room.

“What the hell?” asked Trip.

A machine generated voice that sounded like it was meant to live in the dark answered him. “You have correctly identified me as the entity known to humanoids as Cutter. I cut out what is not wanted. If you do not oppose me then I have no quarrel with you.”

“And if we do oppose you?” asked T’Pol.

“Then I am in a position of power. I have the power to destroy you all.”

“Like hell you do,” said Trip.

“How long can you survive without life support, Captain Tucker?” asked Cutter.

“How long can you survive without energy?” Trip shouted at the ceiling. He could hear T’Pol’s curiosity at this question in his mind, as clearly as if she’d spoken it aloud. It was funny how the static across their link cleared in moments of crisis, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. It was also a symptom worth filing away for when they eventually got to talk to Phlox.

He thought back to T’Pol. “Everything needs food.”

“Longer than you can survive without air,” said Cutter, confirming Trip’s hypothesis, but the answer itself didn’t make him feel any better. The virus laughed again.

****

With nothing working their options for dealing with Cutter were limited. Even if he came up with a plan, telling everyone what to do was going to be difficult. He could communicate with T’Pol without anyone being aware of what he had said, but getting anything across to the others was going to be difficult. Trip grabbed a padd and began tapping out a message. The padd wasn’t networked so it was still operating and unless they were in the line of sight of a security camera, Cutter shouldn’t be able to see what they were doing.

“Follow me,” he wrote on the padd and passed it to Reed, Kathar and T’Pol. It was unnecessary to show it to T’Pol, but Kathar didn’t know about their bond, as far as he was aware, and he wasn’t going to give it away if he didn’t have to. He still didn’t trust the Bolians.

Trip led the group towards a small storage compartment off the corridor outside the entrance to Engineering. He ushered everyone inside and then shut the door. The four of them only just fitted into the small room and the place seemed eerie, lit only by Trip’s flashlight.

“Okay, there are no com systems or cameras in here. As long as we talk quietly it shouldn’t be able to hear us. What are we going to do?”

“I suggest we get that thing off this station, as soon as possible,” said Reed.

“No kidding,” said Trip, sarcastically.

“We need to devise an anti-virus program,” said T’Pol.

“Easier said than done. All of our anti-virus programs are in the computer, which is currently down and they didn’t work anyway. If they’d had any effect at all Cutter wouldn’t be sounding so happy.” Trip didn’t like to sound so negative or state the obvious, but he felt that he had to.

“I realise that, which is why we need to devise a new program, specifically designed to destroy this virus.” T’Pol felt Trip’s previous remark had been a little patronising and it almost came out in her tone of voice, but not quite.

Reed nodded. It was a barely perceptible gesture in the dark cupboard, but the shadow behind him accentuated the movement. “T’Pol’s right. We have to start from scratch, but we have no idea what might work.”

Mim Kathar cleared his throat and then spoke for the first time since Cutter had made itself known. “My government has had dealings with this entity before. One of the pieces of information that I brought to give to Admiral Archer was all the intelligence available on Cutter, and our first version of a countermeasure program.”

“Please tell me that you have this information stored on some sort of electronic storage device that isn’t automatically linked to the nearest computer system,” said Trip, hopefully.

“Given the sensitive nature of the information, it would be very foolish indeed to link it to another computer system. However, there is a bigger issue, the program is not complete.”

“Perhaps I can finish it,” said T’Pol. “I have some expertise in this area.”

“I will return to my quarters and bring the information back here, for you to examine.”

“Very well,” said T’Pol, “I will accompany you.”

“Captain, are you sure that’s wise? He’s trying to kill us,” asked Reed.

“If my hypothesis is correct, without power, Cutter only has a limited reach. It will expend energy if it tries to electrocute us. Captain Tucker has already ascertained that it has a finite period of time before it will need to turn the power back on. The most logical course of action would be for it to sit and wait for us to expire due to lack of life support.”

“It will wait for us to suffocate?” asked Kathar.

“Actually, it’s much more likely that we’ll die from the cold,” said Trip, grimly. “One of the reactor’s main functions is to keep the station heated.”

“We have another problem,” said T’Pol. “Even with a completed anti-viral program we will need a computer to run it on. I doubt a padd will be sufficient.”

“Cutter’s a virus, so he’s got to be running on something,” said Trip.

“Perhaps he’s somehow left part of the computer running,” suggested Read.

“Maybe, but it would have to be using the backup generator. I’ll get Sevak to check. We know next to nothing about this thing, so maybe it doesn’t need to run on anything, like other viruses.”

“Anything is possible. We should attempt to learn as much as we can. We should also send a runner to the C and C,” said T’Pol. “Commander Al-Nasser needs to be kept informed of the situation and he may be able to gain further insight into the problem.”

“I’ll send one of my guys,” said Trip.

“I might have something that could help you with your anti-viral program,” said Reed. “I’ve been working on a simulation.”

“Malcolm, your Kobayashi Maru training simulation isn’t going to help us hunt down a killer virus,” said Trip.

“Actually it might. I’ve written algorithms to mimic seeking and evading behaviour for the Romulan ships. If we can combine it with the Bolian program then we might just have ourselves a blood hound capable of hunting down a sentient virus.” Reed sounded slightly indignant.

T’Pol clasped her hands behind her back. “It could take me some time to write similar routines from scratch. Having this program could prove to be very useful.”

“It’s on a padd in my quarters. I’ll go and get it.” Reed made a move to leave.

“Take Captain Tucker with you. I don’t want you going alone,” said T’Pol.

“Very well,” said Reed, making it clear from his tone that he didn’t particularly feel that he needed company.

“We will meet back here in thirty minutes, no later,” said T’Pol.

“Yes, Captain,” said Trip and Reed. Mim Kathar simply gave a nod of acknowledgement and opened the door, indicating that everyone should get moving. The small party moved out of the storage compartment.

Trip silently issued T’Pol and Kathar with flashlights from one of the emergency stores in Engineering. The entire station was still completely dark and all the engineers now carried their own flashlights as they bustled about trying to work out how to return power to the dead station. A couple of tries to restart the reactor had failed miserably, but Sevak was still issuing orders to try again. Hopefully their efforts would at least keep Cutter occupied while T’Pol and Kathar retrieved the program.

Trip was very glad that he was able to talk to T’Pol across their bond without Cutter listening in. He would have missed having someone to bounce ideas off otherwise.

“Do you think Cutter understand Vulcan? Maybe you could talk to Sevak and tell him what’s going on. Otherwise it’s going to be a lot of typing on a padd.”

T’Pol looked at him. “We should assume that Cutter has access to our translator matrix.”

“Damn, I hadn’t thought of that. Okay, I’ll just have to do it the hard way. Keep in touch.”

“You say that as if we had the option not to be “in touch”,” T’Pol thought. Trip detected a tiny amount of teasing behind her statement and he smiled back at her as she followed Mim Kathar out of Engineering.

Reed was indicating that they should leave too. Trip quickly tapped out a message for Sevak. It didn’t cover the entire situation but he hoped that it would be enough to let his acting SIC know what was going on. He erased the padd once Sevak had indicated that he had read the contents, not wanting to risk Cutter being able to see it. Trip gave a nod to Reed and the pair headed out into the pitch black of the stricken station.

****End of Chapter Five****

T’Pol hadn’t thought that Deep Space One could feel so different in the dark. The corridors had taken on a rather menacing atmosphere and it didn’t seem to be the same place that she now regarded as her home. The disturbing silence produced by the lack of reactor noise, or any other machinery was something that she hadn’t experienced in some time. The last few years of her life had been spent on ships or space stations, and man made structures always had their own persistent hum of machine life. The corridors were also remarkably empty. Occasionally they passed a crewman hurrying somewhere with a flashlight illuminating a small section of corridor in front of them. She thought that these were probably runners, carrying communications between C and C and other areas of the station. The majority of her efficient and well trained crew would all be at their stations, awaiting orders or just waiting for power so that they could do their jobs.

The dark made it more difficult to navigate, forcing T’Pol to rely on her mental layout of the station. Occasionally Trip would reach out and correct her when she was about to take a wrong turn. He knew the station better than she did because he had been spending so much time fixing it and indeed had helped with its design originally. She reached out to touch Trip’s mind at regular intervals, checking in with him and making sure that his progress was not being impeded. This was behaviour that they only ever reserved for dire situations. It would be too much of an invasion to have one’s bond mate constantly asking for updates, normally their presence in each other’s mind was at a much lower level.

Suddenly a light exploded behind her and Kathar, startling them both. It was at the end of the corridor furthest from their destination and there was absolutely no reason for it. T’Pol looked back down the dark corridor, listening to the sound of small pieces of glass falling to the ground. There was silence and she almost thought that it was only a coincidence that the light had picked that moment to disintegrate, perhaps it had failed because of some earlier malfunction. Another light, in front of the first, went pop with a shower of sparks. This could not possibly be a good thing and T’Pol was now beginning to worry. She directed the torch at the ceiling in time to see a third light shatter and it was followed by another and another, in series towards them. They sped up as they neared their position, showering the corridor with sparks and glass.

“Run,” said T’Pol to Kathar. The Bolian did not need to be told twice but she would have expected nothing less from a former spy. Trip had detected her alarm and was asking what was wrong, she sent him a quick “not now” and pulled open the door at the end of the corridor. The two of them tumbled through into another pitch black area of the station, breathing heavily. T’Pol shut the door behind them and they heard the continued sound of broken lights smashing on the deck plating, but then everything was quiet.

“I thought you had determined that Cutter would not make another attempt to harm us,” Kathar accused.

“It seems that I was incorrect. However, I suspect that it was merely trying to frighten us,” replied T’Pol, coldly. She did not appreciate his tone. She didn’t say that Cutter was also probably letting them know that it was watching them.

“Nevertheless…” began Kathar, but T’Pol cut him off.

“I remind you that Cutter is listening to everything that we say. We do not have time to stop and discuss this.”

Kathar nodded once and strode away down the corridor. T’Pol followed him, vigilant for any further games by Cutter. She let Trip know what had happened, reassuring him that all was well and yes, she was being very careful.

“I don’t understand how he’s doing this.” Trip’s thought arrived in her head complete with his frustration at being unable to solve the puzzle.

“He is obviously drawing power from somewhere.”

“There are some components that don’t discharge completely when they’re shut down. Maybe he’s using those.”

T’Pol agreed that this was a possibility. She felt Trip’s focus shift and then his surprise. They had reached Reed’s assigned quarters and the light was on. It was a mechanical impossibility. T’Pol could hear Trip’s brain going through all the possible ways that Cutter could have done this and none of them quite worked, much to his annoyance. Lights did not just work without power.

“Cutter’s playing games with us,” Trip thought.

“Indeed,” replied T’Pol. “Please be vigilant.”

T’Pol noted that Reed had entered the room and was searching through the padds on his desk to find the one he needed. Trip was looking quizzically at the light fittings in the ceiling, but he followed Reed into the room. It was a second later that the door slid shut behind them. Trip immediately moved the manual handle on the door, pulling with all his strength. The door stayed resolutely shut.

“Not again,” he said, out loud. “You’d think Cutter would get another trick.”

“Why bother, when this one works fine?” said Reed, tucking the padd he had retrieved into his sling to leave his good arm free to help Trip with the door. The two of them tried together but again the door stayed shut.

In his head Trip was reaching out for T’Pol. “Watch the doors, t’hy’la.”

“I had noticed your problem. Once we have collected what we need, I will send a team to extricate you.”

“T’Pol, there’s a lot less air in here than there was in the lab,” said Trip. His thoughts were rapidly returning to their previous confinement and near suffocation.

“There is still enough air for several hours,” T’Pol replied. “You will be fine for the time being.”

“Yeah, unless Cutter decides to get creative again.”

“I will be there as soon as I can.”

Trip sighed. “Fine. We’ll wait. There’s not much else to do.”

T’Pol turned her attention back to her own problem. They had reached the Bolians’ temporary quarters. T’Pol pulled open the door and found one of the other Bolians waiting inside.

“I have come to pick up some data,” said Kathar to the other Bolian. He was about to step into the room but T’Pol put out a hand to stop him.

“My colleagues encountered some difficulties with doors,” she explained. Kathar gave T’Pol a rather interested look, at this revelation, obviously wondering how she had come by the knowledge.

“Jakam, please pass me the data storage devices from the desk,” said Kathar. “And I think we will also need the interface device.”

“Of course, Ambassador,” said the other Bolian, he still seemed to be trying to maintain the lie that they were diplomatic personnel, unaware that their cover had been blown. He grabbed the data storage devices, the Bolian equivalent of padds, along with a rather strange looking round metal box and held them out to Kathar across the threshold of the doorway. The door suddenly snapped shut violently, catching the Bolian’s arm between the door and the jamb. Jakam yelled out in pain, which was not surprising given the crack of bone that T’Pol’s ears had picked up. The metal box and the storage devices dropped to the ground, scattering across the corridor.

“Jakam!” Kathar shouted in consternation at his companion’s injury. “We must help him!”

T’Pol didn’t bother to answer Kathar, but got a good grip on the edge of the door and put all her strength into trying to get it to open again. “If I am able to open this door, you must pull Jakam to safety as quickly as you can. I doubt I will be able to hold it for long.”

She was incredibly glad of her Vulcan strength as she pushed against the edge of the door and it moved a little. As the pressure was released on the Bolian’s arm he slid to the ground, leaning against the door and pulling his arm into rest against his side. Kathar got himself into position to be ready to pull Jakam out of the room as soon as T’Pol was able to open the door further. With a final shove, that had her muscles protesting, she pushed the door back enough that Kathar was able to grab Jakam and drag him out of the room. The two Bolians fell back in a heap against the deck plating of the corridor.

T’Pol realised that she could now release the door and her strength was failing. She let go, but the door swept across more quickly than she had anticipated and her right hand felt the full strength of the edge as it once again tried to slam shut. She had to use all of her pain management techniques not scream when her hand broke and the door continued to apply pressure to the break. She summoned up a last reserve of strength and pulled the door open with her free hand, allowing just enough leeway to withdraw both hands from danger. The damage had been done however and she closed her eyes for a second as she composed herself against the pain.

Trip was practically shouting at her across her bond. “T’Pol, what happened? T’Pol? Are you hurt?”

She replied to alleviate his worry. “The door broke my hand. I was not fast enough to remove it and prevent injury.”

She could feel Trip panicking. He was extremely concerned about her injury, more concerned than he needed to be for a few broken bones and she told him this. Unfortunately Trip could feel just how painful the injury was, even though T’Pol was now suppressing it for all she was worth and putting back into place the blocks that had been shattered by her momentary loss in concentration.

She thought clearly to her t’hy’la. “Cutter is still merely playing games. The injury is not life threatening. Please calm yourself. You will need to be focussed in order to defeat this virus.”

Trip’s thoughts did calm a little and she felt him trying to get his emotions under control. There was nothing that he could do, stuck in Reed’s quarters, in any case.

“Make sure you get Phlox to look at that as soon as possible,” said Trip, via their bond.

“Of course,” T’Pol sent back. “I believe it’s a clean break.”

Trip didn’t seem to think that made much difference, it was still a broken hand and he knew it hurt like hell because he’d felt it. T’Pol felt Trip shift his focus back to his own situation as she pointed out that she needed to get on with her task.

“We should get back as quickly as possible,” said T’Pol to the two Bolians, who were picking themselves up from the floor. Jakam’s arm was hugged to his slight frame and he was shaking, probably from shock. “And locate Doctor Phlox,” she added holding her own hand by the wrist.

****

Reed had watched Trip get the far away look in his eyes that meant he was talking to T’Pol. Trip caught Reed’s eye and gave him a quick shake of the head, which he took to indicate that there was nothing T’Pol could do for the moment. They had both put all their strength into trying to pull it open, but Reed was handicapped by his broken arm and the door wouldn’t budge. So Reed had sat down on the bed to wait for rescue, as there seemed to be no point in trying the door again. Trip however had torn off the panel over the door controls and tried to do one of his normal hotwiring tricks, but without power there was nothing to actually make the controls work. Apparently Cutter had powered the door up just long enough to lock it shut. Trip had given up a few moments later with an annoyed kick to the unresponsive door and taken a seat on the bed beside Reed.

The next moment Trip had inexplicably leapt up from the bed and started pacing. He was holding his right hand in his left, as if it was hurting him.

“What’s wrong?” asked Reed, before thinking. Trip just shot him a look. They hadn’t said more than about two words to each other since they’d been locked in, because they were concerned that Cutter could overhear something important. Above all they didn’t want to give away the fact that Trip and T’Pol were able to communicate, as at the moment it was one of their few advantages.

Trip was continuing his worried pacing, although it did seem to be slowing. Finally he stopped. He took several deep breaths and seemed to visibly calm down as Reed watched. He grabbed a padd from the desk and began tapping out a message. He handed it to Reed when he was done.

“Cutter’s playing games again. T’Pol and one of the Bolians were hurt. She says not seriously.”

Trip was still rubbing at his hand, so Reed guessed that was where T’Pol had been injured. It was another aspect of their bond that he found difficult to comprehend, but he’d discovered that it was highly accurate.

Reed nodded his understanding. He cleared the padd and wrote his own message back. “Any idea how long it’s going to be before we get out of here?”

Trip looked at what Reed had written, shrugged and collapsed on the bed. He spoke aloud, dropping the padd beside himself on the bed. “You have no idea how much I’d love to just lie down and fall asleep right now.”

Reed lay back against the wall behind the bed, realising that he was quite tired himself. “Actually, I think I have a pretty good idea.”

“Did you bring your chess board?” asked Trip, suddenly.

Reed was slightly baffled. “Er, yes, as a matter of fact, I did.”

“Well, I reckon it’s going to be a while before they get that door down. Want to have a game?”

“We’re sat here with the possibility of death by suffocation hanging over our heads and you want to play chess?”

“Unless you have a better idea,” said Trip, sitting up.

Reed decided that he didn’t. It wasn’t as if they could do any work on his part of the program until they had the Bolian part. He gave a shrug and got up to pull out his chess board from his kit bag. He grabbed the box of pieces from where he’d left them on the side. He opened the board, balanced it on the bed and took out two pawns, which he closed in two fists. He held them out to Trip.

“Black or white?”

Trip tapped the left hand and Reed revealed the black pawn. Trip smiled. “I always prefer going second.”

“With your style of play, I can understand why,” said Reed, a smirk on his lips. He was teasing Trip, actually the Engineer was a interesting opponent and normally gave him a good game.

Trip just gave him one of his long suffering looks and started setting out the pieces. It took them about twenty minutes to reach the end game, which as usual Reed was winning, when there was a knock at the door.

“Hello in there!” came the shout, which was unmistakeably the voice of Commander Al-Nasser.

Trip got up and went to the door. “Commander Al-Nasser, I can’t tell you how glad we are to hear your voice.”

“We’ll have you out of there as soon as we can,” said Al-Nasser and they heard the sound of a cutting torch begin eating into the door. “This’ll take a few minutes.”

Trip stepped back a safe distance. He was probably making a mental note that this was another door that he’d have to replace. They certainly seemed to be getting through them on Deep Space One today.

Reed smiled. “It looks like we’re going to get a chance to finish our game.”

“There’s no need to be so smug,” replied Trip as he stepped over and made what was most probably his final move. However, although he picked up the piece, he never put it down.

“What’s wrong?” asked Reed, recognising the look on Trip’s face once more.

Trip grabbed the padd and scrawled across it. “Athena’s here.”

****

T’Pol hadn’t been expecting to meet an Admiral of the Fleet in sickbay on Deep Space One, but that was how she found Admiral Archer. She and the Bolians had made it back to Main Engineering, but she had immediately left again to pay a visit to sickbay with Jakam. The young Bolian was now having his arm attended to by one of Phlox’s staff. They had left Kathar doing his best to help the engineers get some sort of emergency power online so that they could at least power a computer. Sickbay was just as dark as everywhere else and Phlox kept the chatter to a minimum as he set and bandaged her hand by the light of a battery powered lantern. When Admiral Archer had appeared through the permanently open sickbay doors, he had been the last person that she was expecting. She felt Trip register her surprise and then she felt him begin to hope that perhaps something was finally going their way.

“T’Pol, Commander Al-Nasser said that I should be able to find you here,” said Archer, holding a flashlight and a padd.

“Are you aware of our situation?” she asked, picking up her own padd from the bed beside her, ready to answer his questions. His greeting would suggest that he knew at least partially what was going on. She suspected that he had just beamed over to the C and C from Athena, probably after they had arrived and discovered the station unresponsive. No doubt he had abandoned his security detail in the corridor, she could not imagine that he had actually come alone.

“Yes, Commander Al-Nasser filled me in.” He said and then tapped out a message on the padd. “We’ll begin beaming non-essential personnel to Athena. Our priority has to be purging the virus.”

T’Pol tapped a message out on her own padd, with her good hand, and the padd resting on her knee. “We have a plan in progress.” She knew that neither of them had put down on the padd the information that Athena wasn’t big enough to evacuate all of Deep Space One’s personnel, but it was a matter of simple arithmetic that they were both aware of. She hoped that it was problem that they would not need to resolve.

Archer nodded in acknowledgement and he typed another message quickly. “What about Excalibur?”

T’Pol shook her head. “We have been out of contact for several hours. We must assume that they have also contracted the virus. We must also assume that there is a cloaked ship observing us and it is hostile.”

Archer’s eyes searched her face but he accepted what she was saying. He typed again. “What’s the plan?”

“The Bolians have a program that they believe may counter the virus. Commander Reed suggested we incorporate this with a routine he has been programming for a simulation, so that it will combat the sentient nature of the virus. Once the virus is purged from our systems we will do the same for Excalibur. We still have some issues to resolve regarding the deployment of the program.”

Archer nodded once more. The relative quiet of sickbay was disrupted by Trip’s arrival, with Reed walking at a much more sedate pace a few steps behind him. She had felt the presence of her t’hy’la getting nearer but hadn’t realised that he was so close. Whilst she was still suppressing the pain of her broken hand, her mental powers were focussed elsewhere, so it was unsurprising that she should have trouble with some of the finer nuances of their bond. The painkillers that Phlox had given her should begin to work soon.

“T’Pol, are you okay?” asked Trip, immediately going to her and putting a hand on her shoulder. T’Pol recognised his need for this touch, to reassure himself that she really was going to be fine, but would still have preferred that he refrained from such a public place. Admittedly, everyone here knew of their relationship, but she still regarded such displays of affection as something that was done in private. It was the Vulcan way of doing things, but Trip wasn’t Vulcan and she had needed to adapt to that.

“It is merely a few broken bones,” said T’Pol.

“I wouldn’t say merely,” interjected Phlox. “You’ve broken four of your five metacarpal bones, but at least the breaks are clean. They should heal perfectly well given a couple of weeks in a cast.”

Trip was still looking and feeling concerned. She did her best to reassure him and felt him begin to calm again as he was able to verify in person that she really was fine. Trip was aware that T’Pol’s mental powers were considerably superior to his own and he’d already had it confirmed earlier that she was completely capable of hiding things from him, although it seemed not indefinitely. Phlox’s confirmation that the breaks were not serious had gone some way to making Trip less worried.

“It’s good to see you again, Admiral,” said Reed, which seemed to also remind Trip that his old friend was now present.

“Yeah, we could sure use some help,” said Trip.

“Well since apparently this situation is at least partially my fault…” Archer looked slightly guilty. “You’d better take me to Mim Kathar.”

Trip nodded. “Follow me.”

T’Pol pushed herself off the biobed.

“Hold it,” said Phlox. “You’ll need a sling for that arm.” The doctor bustled off towards one of the many storage cabinets around the room.

T’Pol managed not to look annoyed by the delay, despite the fact that she was. Her sharp Vulcan ears picked up the doctor’s muttering about how people never had patience when it came to proper medical treatment. Phlox returned and slipped a sling over T’Pol’s head and attached the cradle that would support her hand and elevate it.

“Am I allowed to leave now, Doctor?” asked T’Pol, snappishly, once the procedure was complete.

Trip sent her a quick thought. “He’s only doing his best for you.”

She gave a him a look that instantly silenced any further thoughts that he’d been going to direct at her. “You are normally so well behaved when you are in sickbay,” she thought, sarcastically. And then realised that she’d not only let her emotions get the better of her, but had also borrowed one of Trip’s less pleasant traits to do it. She guessed the pain had affected her control more than she realised.

“Yes, but please keep the sling on and come back tomorrow. Hopefully by then the power will be back and we can discuss your physiotherapy regimen.” Phlox seemed oblivious to T’Pol’s cutting tone. He handed T’Pol a hypospray cartridge that she knew was full of an analgesic. “Broken bones can be very painful, Captain. Please do make use of that if you need it.”

T’Pol inclined her head in thanks and tucked the cartridge into a pocket of her uniform. Trip had also taken note of the exchange and she suspected that he was not going to allow her to “forget” to take her pain medication as she had in the past. She preferred to control her pain with meditation, however it was extremely time consuming and as the Captain of a deep space station it was hard to find sufficient time between her duties. Strong painkillers had a habit of making one’s mind work more slowly though, even if only fractionally. She had known Trip to be just as bad about taking medication when he thought that he needed the edge of a clear mind and she reminded him of that.

Trip’s thought in reply was completely clear and sent with an amused overtone. “It makes a change for me to be the one fussing over you. I know all the tricks, so you’re not getting off easy, t’hy’la.”

“I had assumed that would be the case,” T’Pol replied across their bond and then turned to the others. “We have work to do.” She stood up straight, every inch the Captain and led the way out of sickbay into the dark corridor, not glancing back to see if she was being followed.

Trip sent her one last thought, and she could feel the smile behind it. “I love you, Desert Rose. Let’s kick this thing’s ass.”

****

The group arrived in Engineering to find limited lighting and some power. Trip looked around unhappily. Even if they survived this, it was going to take him a long time to get everything back up and running properly. He was beginning to feel the first pinch of the drop in temperature and he knew T’Pol must be feeling it more. Vulcans preferred a warmer climate, and it was a constant battle between them over the setting for the thermostat in their shared quarters. They’d settled on compromise, which actually meant that neither of them were happy, but at least T’Pol wasn’t shivering in bed.

Archer had gone over to Mim Kathar and they had exchanged a very human handshake. Trip noticed there was no complicated hand waving for the Admiral and Mim Kathar seemed fine with that. Archer had pulled out a padd and was typing furiously. It annoyed Trip a bit that T’Pol had put so much work into her contact procedures only to have everything that she’d worked for undermined by these lying Bolians, but then again if they had useful information, this might all have been worth it.

T’Pol and Reed were also conferring on a padd, so he joined them.

He telepathically framed a question to T’Pol. “How long is this going to take?”

T’Pol continued to type on the padd as she mentally replied to Trip. “We need to combine the programs. As one of them is of Bolian origin, this could take some time.”

“Lieutenant Armitage!” Trip called out into the gloom. One of his Engineers raised her head from what she was doing and came over.

“Yes, sir.”

“Captain T’Pol’s going to need some help. See what you can do.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Armitage.

If anyone could help T’Pol then it would be Armitage. She probably knew the computer systems the best and was a competent programmer. She had already turned to T’Pol and was looking at the contents of the padd that they were using. She began to contribute small tweaks to what T’Pol was suggesting that she thought would work better with the existing computer programs. Which all assumed that they could get some sort of computer system up and working long enough to actually run their anti-virus program.

Lieutenant Sevak was approaching them. The Vulcan handed him a padd with an update of their engineering situation on it. Interestingly Sevak had found a small energy bleed that appeared to be coming from the Bolian ship. So, that was how Cutter was doing it. He’d tapped into their power system.

Trip turned the padd around so that T’Pol could read it and pointed at the relevant bit. He once again made use of his telepathic link. “T’Pol, did anyone check on the Bolian ship?”

“We were unable to open the airlock doors. The assumption was made that this was because the Bolian ship also had no power.” T’Pol accepted the padd and began scrolling down.

“I think that may have been wrong. They’re probably disabled, but I think Cutter’s using their warp core to get the power he needs.” Trip suddenly had an idea. “And I think we can do the same. I’ll get some people on it.” He called out across Engineering again. “Turner!”

A young Ensign came running over to him. He was about to issue orders when he remembered that he shouldn’t give instructions out loud. He grabbed Sevak’s padd back from T’Pol and typed out a message. “Sevak, take Turner and go down to the docking ring where the Bolian ship is. I think they have power and that’s what Cutter is using. I need you to patch us in.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sevak.

“Any questions?” Trip typed.

“No, sir,” said Sevak. Turner shook his head. He picked up a tool kit and the two engineers left together.

Trip had confidence that Sevak and Turner would be able to deal with anything that they came across. The two were a good team, Sevak had a huge amount of knowledge and logic on his side, Turner seemed to have a way with mechanical things and was picking up more and more every day. Short of going down there himself it was the best he could do, and he didn’t want to leave Engineering while they were trying to put the anti-virus program together.

Trip noticed that Kathar, T’Pol and Reed were now conferring on a padd in a corner of Engineering. Archer was standing beside them, looking like a spare wheel. He decided that he was probably needed there and joined the small group.

“We have an interface system,” Mim Kathar was typing. He passed the padd to T’Pol and picked up the interface that he was talking about.

“How does it work?” Reed typed.

“It is a total immersion system,” replied Kathar on the same padd. That meant it was a device that directly linked a person’s cerebral cortex to a computer, usually via some sort of visual, virtual reality interface.

Trip rolled his eyes. “Storage cupboard, now.”

T’Pol was sending him pointed queries but Trip just told her to wait and led the way to the storage cupboard. Archer was looking slightly baffled as he hadn’t been through this rigmarole before, but after a look from T’Pol he followed the others. Trip once more ushered everyone into the cupboard. It was even more cramped now, with five people inside.

“What is all this, Trip?” asked Archer, when the door was shut.

“Cutter can’t hear us in here. There are no com points and no cameras,” Trip explained and then turned to Kathar. “What the hell is this total immersion system? Your part of the plan was to provide the anti-virus program.”

“I realise that,” said Kathar. “However, given the nature of the virus it may be necessary to give the program some help. The only way of actually getting inside the computer is one of these systems.”

Trip shook his head vigorously. “I’ve heard bad things about total immersion systems. They have a habit of frying people’s brains.”

“I can assure you that this one has been extensively tested,” said Mim Kathar.

“You seem to have come here remarkably well equipped to deal with a virus that you supposedly knew nothing about,” said Reed, from his dark corner of the cupboard. He’d turned off his flashlight, and his voice almost seemed disembodied. Trip wasn’t at all surprised that it was Malcolm who ended up putting into words something that had been at the back of his own mind for a while now. “You’re not telling us something.”

The Bolian glanced at Archer.

“It’s okay,” said Archer. “These people are some of my most trusted colleagues and friends. I’ve worked with them for many years. Nothing you say here will leave this room.”

“The Bolians have recently been talking to the Romulans about an alliance,” said Kathar.

Everyone in the room seemed to straighten up and become more alert. They’d just been through a war with the Romulans and no one wanted another one. The Romulans had been defeated and, although their resources were at a low ebb, it was only a matter of time before they were rebuilt. Forming alliances with other alien species was one way in which they might rebuild those resources more quickly.

“Nothing has been formally decided, but I felt that I could not remain on Bolarus when the government was pursuing a policy with which I disagreed so strongly.”

“That is certainly disturbing news,” said T’Pol, as usual completely understating the issue. “However, it doesn’t explain your knowledge of the virus.”

Archer sighed. “T’Pol, Cutter started out as a Romulan virus. The only reason the Bolians have the knowledge that they do is because of an exchange of information. Kathar assumed rightly that if their defection was discovered, it would be Cutter that was sent after them.”

“Admiral, with all due respect, you need to leave and get this information back to Starfleet,” said Reed.

Archer shook his head. “Athena have their instructions. I’ve passed on as much as I could verbally. I’m staying here until we can resolve this situation. You know as well as I do that Athena doesn’t have the capacity to transport everyone off Deep Space One, and I’m not leaving while there are still people on this station in danger.”

“And you actually accused me of being a martyr,” complained Trip.

“You learned from the best,” muttered Reed, in a slightly annoyed tone.

“Why did you wait until now to give us this information?” asked T’Pol, turning back to Kathar.

“If the news of a potential alliance between Bolarus and the Romulans was to get out before the alliance is finalised, then it could have implications for my people. Not all of our neighbours are as enthusiastic about the Romulans or the idea that one of their allies would suddenly be very close. They would attack us,” said Kathar. “Without the support of the Romulans that could be deadly.”

“So why are you even telling us?” asked Trip. “Wouldn’t you be better off making an alliance with the Romulans? You know the Federation is going to try to put a stop to it.”

“The Federation will put a stop to it, but whilst protecting us and potentially offering us an alternative alliance.” Mim Kathar seemed very certain of this, but to be honest Trip wasn’t quite as sure and he could see Archer’s own reticence in his lack of immediate confirmation of Kathar’s words. “The Romulans may say they offer an alliance, but there is no doubt in my mind that it is a front for their eventual conquest of our world.”

“This is not solving our immediate problem,” said T’Pol.

“I don’t want anyone using that total immersion interface device,” said Trip. “It hasn’t been tested with our systems.”

“It may be the only thing that is capable of giving the anti-virus program the power that it needs,” said Kathar. “I am not trying to place obstacles in our way. I have had some experience of this virus and I know that it is not going to respond to normal tactics. I recommend that you try what I am suggesting.”

Trip knew that he didn’t look happy, but he didn’t really care what the Bolian thought of him at this stage. “As a last resort,” he conceded. “And if anyone’s going to do it, then it’s going to be me.”

It took the time from the words leaving his mouth to reaching T’Pol’s ears for her to protest across their bond. “I would be the better choice. I have better developed mental abilities.”

“You’re injured,” Trip shot back, not really caring if it was relevant or not.

T’Pol was not prepared to give up that easily. “I outrank you. I could order you not to do it.” She was thinking about the telepresence chair and their argument over that, all those years ago. It had been one of the things that had contributed to Trip’s decision to leave and go to Columbia. It had not been a particularly happy time for either of them.

Trip was thinking about that incident too and now shamelessly blackmailed T’Pol, by reminding her how much damage it had done to their relationship when she ignored his point of view. “You could order me, but I’d still do it to stop you from trying it. This doesn’t need a telepathic talent and I know the inner workings of the station better than you do. It’s logical for me to be the one.”

T’Pol wasn’t entirely convinced, but she did acknowledge his point about him knowing the station.

“Perhaps it would be better for me to try it,” said Reed. “Our Chief Engineer might need his brain again later.” No one had been aware of his telepathic exchange with T’Pol, although Trip could see Archer was keeping an eye on them and had probably guessed that they were communicating telepathically.

“Malcolm…” began Trip.

“Unfortunately, both hands are required to operate the mechanism,” said Kathar.

Trip almost smiled. “I guess that counts you and T’Pol out then.”

“But not me,” said Archer. Trip should have realised that Archer would want to volunteer too.

“The day you can tell me how to wire up a Fourier transformer, then you get to take the engineering risks,” said Trip.

“A Fourier what?” asked Archer.

“I think you just made his point for him, Admiral,” said Reed. “I suspect that an in depth knowledge of the station’s inner workings might help.”

Archer sighed. “Fine, Trip gets the job, but I want Phlox standing by, and this is only used as a last resort.”

Trip nodded in firm agreement. If he could possibly avoid using the interface device then he would. Unfortunately he had a feeling that Cutter wasn’t going to make this easy for them.

****End of Chapter Six****

The group went back to work, piecing together the bits of the computer program that they hoped would defeat Cutter. T’Pol had sent a runner to sickbay to get Phlox. Trip had protested that the doctor’s presence wasn’t necessary, but T’Pol had used his own arguments against him. Total immersion systems were dangerous. It didn’t help that she was quite capable of digging out all the terrible stories that he’d heard about total immersion systems from his own memories.

Sevak returned from his errand to the docking port, seeking out Trip in the poor light of Main Engineering. Sevak handed Trip a padd. It detailed all the work that they’d just done, patching into the Bolian ship’s power supply.

“We have left it unconnected, but done all the work required. I believe Cutter will notice this connection and attempt to cut it off if we connect it too soon,” Sevak had written. “Ensign Turner is awaiting your order to make the connection.”

“Good work,” said Trip, handing the padd to T’Pol so that she too could read the information there. He used their bond to communicate his idea for how they should proceed. “We should get everything set up here and then we’ll make the connection to the Bolian ship. Hopefully Cutter won’t notice that we’re stealing their power until it’s too late to do anything.”

T’Pol agreed, but spent the next few minutes typing out instructions to everyone that didn’t have the benefit of a telepathic bond for their communications. There was also some argument about exactly how long they might have after the power had been connected. As far as Trip was aware the computer, although severely corrupted, was still capable of functioning, but Mim Kathar was doubting of this. To be honest, it didn’t really matter if the computer was completely down because then their plan would stall before it even got a chance to begin. They just couldn’t do this from a few networked padds, they needed the power of the main computer.

Archer’s communicator beeped at him. Athena were probably just checking in to see what was going on. “Archer here, go ahead.”

“Admiral, we’ve just detected Excalibur on our long range sensors. It looks like they’ve turned around and heading back this way.”

Archer caught Trip’s eye and they exchanged a surprised look. “Have you had any communication with them?”

“No, they’re not answering hails.”

“Cutter’s in control,” Trip wrote on a padd, holding it up for Archer to see.

Archer nodded, talking into his communicator once again. “What’s their ETA?”

“About four hours,” replied the voice from Athena.

“Captain, we think this virus has control of them. Don’t let them near the station, take out their engines if you have to.”

“Yes, sir. Athena out.”

Trip happened to be facing Reed as Archer gave the order to take out the engines, and could see a look of desperate worry pass across his face, but he quickly turned his attention back to the padd he was working on with Mim Kathar. Trip had to admire his ability to keep up appearances, but he knew that Reed must be tearing himself apart inside. Excalibur had only just recovered from a very close call and it didn’t need another one. Not to mention that Reed had made it quite clear earlier how he felt about being stuck on Deep Space One while his ship was in trouble.

All his thoughts brought Trip right back to square one. He’d had enough of watching his station die by degrees. They had to rid themselves of Cutter before anymore life was lost or damage done. He called over a couple of his engineers and gave them their final orders. They had to be ready to do this now, and as much as he hated it, the quickest way was going to be to use the Bolian interface device. He watched as they scurried away to inform the rest of the engineering staff, passing padds around to ever increasing numbers of people before he was sure that everyone knew his intention. T’Pol had already registered what he was doing as he approach Mim Kathar.

“Give me the interface device,” said Trip, aloud.

Mim Kathar blinked a couple of times in surprise, but said nothing as Trip took the device from him and headed towards the computer that had been set up to receive input from the interface. T’Pol was waiting to intercept him as he walked the final few steps.

“We are not ready,” T’Pol thought to him, putting a hand out to stop him in his tracks.

“Sure you are,” replied Trip, telepathically. “I know you’d like to do more testing and make sure all the bugs are out, but we’re kind of short on time.”

T’Pol knew this. She had calculated exactly how long it would take to perform the tests and set up the device. Trip knew that her calculations indicated that they would be cutting things extremely fine, and he was very aware that T’Pol had worked that out too.

“The total immersion interface was to be an option of last resort.” Her thoughts were swift and hard hitting as they reached his mind. It was completely clear to him that she did not like him doing this. The words that formed in his mind were only half her objection as well, he was once again getting his own words thrown back at him, accompanied by pictures and source data.

“I think we’re there, t’hy’la. We don’t have time for any more testing.” He gestured using his hands from force of habit, even though his lips hadn’t formed any words. Telepathic arguing might be faster, but it was just as fierce in places.

“Your mind will be directly interfacing with this program. It is very important that it works correctly.” T’Pol’s eyes were flashing with disguised worry and half-suppressed anger. Trip feared that it was obvious to everyone around them that they were currently engaged in a heated telepathic discussion. The crew really didn’t need to see the Command staff disagreeing at a time like this. He could see Archer already breaking off from a conference with Kathar to come over to them, probably to break it up.

Trip played his final card. “I’ve just given Sevak fifteen minutes until we make the connection. He’s already using the runner network to inform Ensign Turner when to make the connection. I’ve sent the message, we have to do it now.”

T’Pol was angry with him now. He could definitely feel it, and it wasn’t often that T’Pol let him feel one of her supposedly suppressed emotions quite so clearly. It surprised him a little and frightened him. The anger was so bright and vivid, almost burning him to be near it. He then actually experienced the process that T’Pol went through as she buried an emotion, another unusual occurrence, and suddenly she was completely calm once more. The absence of her previous emotions was almost deafening to his human sensibilities, and almost more alarming. Her eyes were hard, though, an echo of the harsh emotion that he’d just felt behind them.

T’Pol spoke aloud softly, the hint of a threat behind her words, and it carried to him easily in the relative quietness of Engineering. “I do not appreciate you forcing my hand.” He wondered if this meant that she didn’t trust herself to use their bond and not lose her emotional control, or perhaps their telepathic connection was just malfunctioning again. Her mental shutters were well and truly in place, so it was impossible for him to tell.

Trip replied in the same manner. “It’s either this or Excalibur destroys the station.”

Archer obviously heard these two sentences as he approached and paused before coming nearer. T’Pol glanced in his direction briefly, before fixing Trip with a serious look. “Very well, we will proceed.” She strode away towards Reed and Kathar, a padd in her good hand ready to give them their final instructions.

Trip shook his head, at least partially because he hated going against T’Pol.

“She’ll get over it,” said Archer.

Trip gave a sigh. “Maybe.” He then tapped out a rough explanation of what he and T’Pol had argued about for Archer to read. He gave Trip a rather exasperated look.

“I agree with her in parts,” said Archer.

Trip grimaced. “Great. Well the two of you can compare notes later. Right now, I’ve got work to do.”

He placed the container that held the total immersion device on the workbench beside the main computer. He opened the box and inside were the various components. He had seen one of these before and in fact even tried it out once, something that he hadn’t wanted to pass on to the others. He’d found one in an alien market town whilst on shore leave and couldn’t resist giving it a go, his curiosity getting the better of him. Even then he’d known the risks, but gone ahead anyway. He’d ended up with a killer headache for his trouble but at least he’d gained some experience which might help now. He certainly would never have willingly put on one of these devices again, if he’d actually had options.

The total immersion device consisted of a headset, with various pads that would be placed on his head to transmit signals directly into and receive signals from his brain, and a pair of goggles that showed him a visual representation of the computer interface. The other part of the device was a set of ten thimble-like pieces of metal that fitted onto each of his fingers. This was why the device required two hands to make it work. The thimbles would transmit the relative position of his hands and how they were orientated, allowing him more ways to interface with his environment.

Mim Kathar arrived beside him and indicated that he would help put the equipment on him. Trip was very obliged for the help, since he didn’t want to get anything wrong at this stage and blow their plan before they even got started. Phlox suddenly appeared from across Main Engineering and started scanning him, no doubt to give himself a baseline comparison before they began.

“I would have preferred to have done this in sickbay,” said Phlox.

“This is where the action is, Doc,” said Trip, flippantly.

“Let’s hope not too much action,” replied Phlox, ruefully. Trip had to acknowledge that he’d had his fair share of illness and injury recently.

One of Trip’s engineers brought a chair over for him so that he could sit down whilst using the interface. This wasn’t a piece of furniture normally found in Main Engineering so it must have been brought from elsewhere. A quick check with the engineer told him that it was T’Pol who had ordered this new addition to the room, however he wasn’t upset with her. Normally he hated his weaknesses being shown up in front of his staff, but today he could have kissed her. He hadn’t been joking when he’d told Reed earlier that he’d happily have fallen asleep on his bed, but for the moment he had to keep going.

Kathar finished off the last adjustments to the head set and finger pieces, declaring Trip ready to proceed. Wires led from the headset down to the computer in a complicated arrangement that he didn’t entirely understand, but at least the Bolian seemed sure of himself. Trip found himself surrounded by people, some of whom were monitoring him, some of whom were monitoring the computer in front of him (using conventional means), and everyone was waiting for the power to come back. T’Pol had taken up position on his left, with Archer and Reed hovering to his right. Trip positioned the goggles on his forehead, in preparation for the return of power.

“If you experience any discomfort then you must stop,” said T’Pol. She could feel his nervous tension at the wait and was trying to calm him.

Trip just nodded, not really trusting himself to speak or use their bond coherently at the moment. He had no intention of stopping unless it looked like his life might be at stake. T’Pol knew that and they were both aware that his duty was to protect the station and the people on it at any cost, including his life. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that, but neither he nor T’Pol had fooled themselves into thinking that this was going to be easy.

“Cutter’s being suspiciously quiet,” said Reed.

“It’s probably putting all its energy into staying in contact with the piece of itself on Excalibur,” said Archer.

“Five minutes,” said T’Pol.

“I’m beginning to wish I’d given Sevak and Turner less time,” said Trip, wanting to get this over and done with.

“We’re still loading the final pieces of the program onto the datachip, so I’m glad we’ve got a few more minutes,” said Reed, bending down to check on something. “It should be done in a few more seconds.”

Trip pulled down the goggles over his eyes. “As long as it’s all done in time.”

He then heard Reed say “oh hell”, and suddenly the headset activated and he had barely a second to realise that Cutter had decided to turn the power back on – on his own terms.

****

Trip found himself in a black room lit by bright blue lights that sped across the wall in little circles. He looked down at himself and found that he had materialised a body that looked remarkably like the one that he had in the real world. He felt out with his mind in much the same way that he used when trying to establish a connection with T’Pol and found that he could detect the flow of information around him. He was inside the computer, standing amongst the data streams. In front of him, he could see a floating shiny red sphere, slightly larger than a baseball and the consistency of coloured glass. It was labelled with the words “anti-virus”.

“Good job, Malcolm,” said Trip, as he grabbed hold of the sphere. “Okay, what do I do with it now?”

There was the sound of ominous laughing. “They sent you and didn’t tell you what to do.”

Trip recognised the voice. He looked around the room but didn’t see anyone. “You like games, don’t you, Cutter?”

“Games are for children in your world. You’re in my territory now, Captain Tucker. Everything here is controlled by me and nothing is a game,” said Cutter. Suddenly a dark, shadowy shape appeared. It was like all the shadows from the corners of the room were being pulled into coalescing into the shape of a humanoid and it made Trip very worried indeed.

Trip felt out with his mind. “T’Pol, now would be a really good time for you to give me some advice.”

“She can’t hear you. But I can,” said Cutter, his shadowy form becoming more defined by the second. “Telepathy, an interesting development. It doesn’t work when you’re connected to the Bolian total immersion system. Perhaps Mim Kathar forgot to mention that.”

Trip ignored Cutter and tried again. “T’Pol? Come on t’hy’la, I could really use your help.” He hoped that Cutter was bluffing about the telepathy issue, but it was looking more likely that he could be telling the truth.

“Have you ever considered that she doesn’t love you?” asked Cutter, circling around Trip.

“No, never,” said Trip.

“Liar,” proclaimed the virus. He was now fully formed and about the same size and shape as Trip himself, but still trailed shadows as he moved. “Your mind is interesting.”

“Get out of my head,” said Trip, angrily. He concentrated on putting up his mental shields in the hope that it would block out Cutter, but the virus didn’t seem to be connecting telepathically. This was a direct electrical connection with his brain and Cutter was a computer virus who seemed to have no trouble tearing down his blocks.

“You invaded my domain. I feel I’m within my rights to poke about in your head while you poke about in my mainframe,” said Cutter.

“It isn’t your mainframe,” said Trip. “It’s mine.” He looked down at the sphere in his hands. He tried twisting it, as if he could unscrew it like a jar, but that didn’t seem to work.

“You have very little experience of total immersion interfaces,” said Cutter.

“I’m a fast learner,” said Trip, defiantly, but he was missing the link with T’Pol. It felt like he’d lost a piece of himself and he had no idea how to get the anti-virus program running. This was really not going according to plan.

Cutter reached out a shadowy hand and placed it on Trip’s arm before he could react and move away. Pain shot out from Cutter’s touch and Trip stepped back quickly, letting go of the anti-virus sphere as he did so.

“The brain is just a complicated computer and it doesn’t take long to discover how to program it. I can stimulate your pain receptors just as easily as I can read your thoughts as they run across the surface of your mind.” Cutter held out the palm of his hand and showed Trip the blue electricity that ran across it. It reminded Trip of the effect that he had first seen when he and T’Pol had been trapped in the science lab. “I don’t even need to touch you.”

Suddenly blue lightening arced from Cutter’s hand and hit Trip with a tremendous force, full in the chest, throwing him back against the wall. It didn’t seem to make any difference that this was a virtual world, the impact still hurt. However he was able to shake it off much more easily than he could have in the real world. He pulled himself to his feet, leaning his back against the wall. The shadows swirled for a moment and coalesced back into a figure in front of Trip.

“If you can’t even protect yourself, how do you plan to protect this station?” Cutter’s voice came from the direction of the figure but it seemed disembodied all the same, echoing eerily in the room.

Cutter once again touched Trip’s arm and this time he held on, allowing the sparks to flow across his body as Trip writhed in agony. He tried to pull away, but the shadowy hand had an amazingly strong grip. Eventually Cutter let go and Trip dropped to the floor. His whole body felt bruised and sore.

Trip put a hand on the wall, at first to provide a bit more support for his aching virtual body, but he felt a hum beneath his fingers. He instinctively knew that this was the pulse of the computer and he reached out to touch it in much the same way that he would have reached out for T’Pol. He could hear the information running through the walls and more importantly he could tap into it. This was how it was supposed to work. He spotted the small red sphere of the anti-virus program, once again floating in the air. He managed to stagger to his feet once more, again seeing shadows swirling around that suddenly came together to make Cutter’s chosen image.

“You can’t win this, so why are you even trying. My mission was for the Bolians. Give them to me and you can all leave.”

“You expect me to believe that?” said Trip.

His mind was racing, trying to remember all the mental exercises that T’Pol had taught him. He desperately needed some of her mental abilities now. In particular he was trying to dredge up everything that she’d ever taught him about the art of “defensive telepathy”, or what to do about someone trying to access your mind when you didn’t want them to. Putting up mental blocks was one way, but there were other more sophisticated techniques that he’d never really expected to need. The only person who ever wanted to access his mind was T’Pol and he’d never had much reason to refuse, nor had she ever tried to push past blocks that he had erected. Blocks didn’t seem to be working to well here so he needed a new tactic. He remembered how Cutter had spoken of his thoughts moving across the surface of his mind and he began to recite the trigonometric functions. It had to be something that he didn’t have to think about too much, something he knew so well that he could recite it easily while he got on with other things.

“You can believe what you like,” said Cutter. “Handing over the Bolian traitors is still your best course of action to avoid the loss of every life on this station and, of course, the ship coming towards us. Even your Admiral Archer can’t save you this time.”

“If we die then you do too,” Trip pointed out, stopping his recitations for a moment.

“It doesn’t quite work like that for me,” said Cutter. “My original program never left Romulus. I am merely a child of that program, as is my own child aboard Excalibur. If I am able to escape I will return all my knowledge to my parent, but it is no great loss if I am destroyed with this station.”

“Great, a suicidal computer virus,” muttered Trip, as he resumed reciting and began to assemble the tools that he needed to put the anti-virus program into operation. He isolated systems and changed the data flow of others, just by thinking about it. It was an exhilarating feeling in some ways, to be able to manipulate the computer at such a base level with such ease. He was almost ready to start the anti-virus program, when suddenly Cutter spoke.

“What are you doing?” asked the virus. The tone was one of academic interest rather than threat, as if nothing could harm it. To a certain extent Cutter was right. Trip ignored the question his concentration divided already between surface thoughts of trigonometry and deeper thoughts on how to get the anti-virus program running. Trip reached out for the virus sphere, willing it to come towards him and he was very surprised when it flew into his hand. Before Cutter could do anything, on a desperate hunch, Trip slammed the sphere into the wall, where it dissolved and disappeared. The shadowy figure put its head on one side. “Your faith in your technology is impressive and misplaced. The Bolians’ program will not stop me.”

For a millisecond, Cutter’s body flickered, a bit like the lights when the Bolians had first come aboard.

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” said Trip. “We made a few changes.”

Cutter flickered and then became solid. “Not enough changes. I can still defeat it, but not while I’m wasting time with you. It’s time to stop playing games, Captain Tucker, and do away with all impediments to the completion of my mission.” The beam of lightning struck Trip and he fell to his knees in agony, desperately hanging on to conscious as he tried to fight past the pain and find a way to attack Cutter. There had to be a way. None of this was real. He just had to find a way to manipulate his environment to his advantage. If he could just be free of the pain for a moment then he might be able to think.

He cried out the name of the one person who could help him. “T’Pol!”

****

T’Pol heard Reed say “oh hell”, a couple of seconds after she saw the start up sequence light up on the reactor. The backup generator kicked in and suddenly the computer had power once more. She had no time to warn Trip, the realisation of what was happening had taken her fractionally too long and all she could do was watch as he suddenly went rigid in the chair. The interface had pulled him into the computer as soon as it had been powered up, something that she had not anticipated.

“What happened? We haven’t run the program yet.” Archer was looking confused.

“It was Cutter, he turned the power back on before we could. He’s giving himself the only advantage that he can, one of surprise,” said Reed.

Trip was turning his head and, most likely, looking around at his virtual environment. His fingers were moving, probably navigating his way around as Mim Kathar had told him to.

“Trip? What’s going on?” asked Archer.

Trip didn’t answer and when T’Pol attempted to use their link she found it missing. That alone was almost enough for her to lose her carefully erected emotional control.

“I don’t think that he can hear you, or at least he’s unable to process the signals at the moment,” said Phlox.

“I cannot reach him either,” said T’Pol. Her tone sounded flat, but Archer caught her eye, and she was certain he had some idea how much the total loss of contact with her t’hy’la was affecting her.

“Kathar, you didn’t say anything about not being able to talk to him,” said Archer.

“It doesn’t affect Bolians in this manner and you didn’t mention anything about a telepathic connection,” said Kathar. “It must be something to do with differences in our biology.”

Phlox looked at his scans. “It is possible it could be an artefact of his human make up. I would have preferred to examine the device more thoroughly before we connected Captain Tucker to it, however given the circumstances, there wasn’t the time. We shouldn’t let him stay in too long, his heart rate is elevated and I’m seeing some changes in his brainwave patterns that shouldn’t be allowed to continue.”

Archer nodded. “Let me know when you think it’s become a problem and we’ll pull him out.”

“Of course,” said Phlox.

Suddenly Trip seemed to be in pain, he twisted in his seat as if trying to get away from something.

“Trip?” asked T’Pol, crouching down by the chair. The lower half of his face, not covered by the headset, was contorted into a grimace.

“His blood pressure and heart rate are up,” said Phlox.

“He is being attacked by Cutter,” said T’Pol. “It is the only explanation.” She wasn’t getting absolutely nothing across her bond, but it was just impressions. The loss of contact was disturbing her more than it should and she could feel static creeping into the edges of her thoughts in the same way that it had been disrupting their bond. She shoved it back, telling it firmly that now was not the time. She concentrated on the little that she was getting from Trip. Mostly is was confusion and pain. She closed her eyes briefly trying to get deeper, but it wasn’t working.

“Can we help him?” asked Archer.

“Maybe,” said Reed, going to the computer console, “it depends how much of the system Cutter is controlling and how much of his attention is being taken up with Trip.” Lieutenant Armitage was staring intently at screen beside Reed’s and seemed to be assessing the damage to the computer’s core systems.

Trip had relaxed a little, but he was still breathing quickly. It didn’t last long. A moan escaped his lips and he was obviously hurting once more. A battle seemed to be raging in the virtual world and T’Pol had no idea if Trip was winning.

“I can manually repair a few of these systems,” said Armitage. “If the virus is still present then it won’t last long, but it could be enough to help Captain Tucker out of a tight situation.”

“Do it,” said T’Pol.

Armitage gave a swift nod and then got down to the task at hand, helped by Lieutenant Reed. T’Pol watched them for a few seconds before turning back to her bond mate. She felt a piercing shaft of pain lance through her brain and she dropped to one knee, using her good arm to prevent her from pitching forward onto the deck. She looked over to Trip to see a dribble of blood begin from his left nostril. It was stark red against his pale skin. Then she heard one word that blocked out every other sound in the room. Trip had called her name and it had pierced through the interference caused by the interface device.

Archer had moved over to her at some point and was now supporting her. She knew there was only one course of action to be followed. She edged forward across the floor, unable to get up because of the pain transferred to her from Trip. Archer helped her, seeing what she was doing. She stopped when she was crouched at Trip’s feet and grabbed his hand in hers. She was careful not to dislodge the sensors that were attached to his fingers, but still made sure that she had a good grip.

She turned to Archer. “What I’m about to do is very dangerous for both of us. Don’t try to stop me and don’t try to break the connection.”

Archer didn’t have time to ask what T’Pol was going to do, because she had already begun to recite the mantra.

“My mind to your mind, my thoughts to your thoughts, my heart to your heart, my soul to your soul. Hear me, t’hy’la, and let me in.” T’Pol screwed her eyes shut tightly and blocked out everything apart from the small thread of Trip’s consciousness that she felt.

“T’Pol!” shouted Phlox in alarm, obviously aware of how dangerous a mind meld was in this situation. She ignored him and continued.

****

Trip was lying on the virtual floor, wrapped in agony and most likely dying. Cutter wasn’t playing this time. Suddenly a bright, white light appeared, formed itself into the shape of T’Pol and knelt down beside him. She took his hand and suddenly Trip felt his strength return. He could sense his mental blocks strengthening and T’Pol seemed to be keeping Cutter out of his head. She turned towards the black shadows and her light seemed to make them dissipate until they were dispersed around the room.

“Hi, T’Pol,” said Trip, breathlessly. “You have no idea how pleased I am to see you.”

“Actually I have a very good idea,” said T’Pol. “In order to make a connection with you, I had to perform a mind meld.”

Trip just looked at T’Pol for a second. “Wasn’t that kind of dangerous?”

“Yes, but it was necessary. I suggest we discuss this later after we have dealt with the immediate threat. I was only able to disrupt the virus’s abilities temporarily.”

As T’Pol finished her sentence, Cutter’s shadows began to creep back together again.

“Want to defeat the bad guy?” asked Trip, with a smile.

“Always,” replied T’Pol. She helped Trip to his feet. “I assume you have a plan.”

“Whilst he was busy trying to kill me, I did a bit of poking about in his head. Well, his code, anyway. I found a couple of weak points and I tweaked the anti-virus program. It should work now, but we’ll need to keep him occupied.”

T’Pol nodded. “We should be able to turn his own weapons against him.”

Cutter was back together again. It was still a shadowy figure, but definitely not so affected by T’Pol’s light now. It was then that a large, red dog, who seemed to be made of a shiny, transparent material, emerged from the wall to their left. It looked around, seeming to sniff the non-existent air, and turned it’s red eyes towards Cutter. The dog barked once, then pounced, and was thrown back by the sudden appearance of some sort of energy shield around Cutter. He wasn’t exactly sure why the anti-virus program should appear as a dog but it did seem appropriate in some ways, and he wouldn’t have wanted to meet this dog on a dark night if he was computer virus.

“I think we need that distraction now, T’Pol. The anti-virus program just found Cutter’s core programming.” said Trip. Before the words had left his head, T’Pol was transmitting instructions for what they needed to do. He composed his mind and did what she suggested, he threw back at Cutter all the hurt and pain that he had caused him in the form of electrical signals. White light shot out from his hand, the visual embodiment of his actions, and beside him T’Pol was doing the same. The light ate through the energy shield, piece by piece. It was enough to overload Cutter’s processes and allow the anti-virus program time to pounce once more. The dog bit down on the rough position of Cutter’s neck and the shadows writhed and swirled.

Cutter flickered for a few seconds as it struggled. It flickered again for longer and then it let out an electronic wail, the like of which Trip had never heard before. It was pitiful and pained, whilst still managing to be horribly menacing. It filled the space that they were in and Trip covered his ears, abandoning his attempts to continue to distract Cutter. He noticed that T’Pol was doing the same, it was probably worse for her sensitive Vulcan ears. He turned towards her, pulling her into the wall away from Cutter. He suspected that the virus was about to end its program in a spectacular fashion. They both sheltered against the wall, more from force of habit than from any real fear that this could harm them.

The scream reached a crescendo and then there was an explosion of darkness, coating the room with black, as the shadows were more like paint. Then they receded, disintegrating and disappearing as everything began to brighten. Trip turned around to see no sign of Cutter and a very smug looking dog sat in the middle of the room, wagging its virtual tail.

“Good dog,” said Trip. The dog wagged its tail even faster, and Trip did a double take. “Did we just create an intelligent anti-virus program?”

“Perhaps a very limited type of intelligence,” said T’Pol.

Trip went over to scratch the dog behind the ears, which it seemed to respond to. “I hope you’re house trained.”

The dog gave a short bark, and Trip gave it a long look. Had it just answered him indignantly or was it his imagination? He shook his head. He’d been in here too long, inanimate objects were seeming to take on a life of their own, it was time to go.

“I’ll break the connection through the mind meld first. I wouldn’t want it to interfere with you when you exit the computer. I have no idea how a mind meld might affect that process,” said T’Pol. Trip noticed that she seemed to have picked up a slight Southern twang to her voice, and it made him smile.

“I don’t think anyone has ever melded with someone who was using a computer interface like this one,” said Trip.

T’Pol’s eyes twinkled with humour. “I was not aware that you knew the history of mind melding so well, but I suspect that you are correct and this was one of my reasons for suggesting it.”

“My thoughts to your thoughts, remember?” replied Trip. “I know what you know.”

“Of course,” replied T’Pol. “I was not sure how well the meld would work. I do seem to be pickin’ up some of your traits however.”

“Did you just say “pickin’”?”

T’Pol looked a little disturbed. “I should most definitely end the meld before I pick up any more of your less desirable personality traits.”

“Hey,” said Trip, indignantly.

“I will see you in the real world, t’hy’la,” said T’Pol, and she faded into transparency, then vanished.

The dog put its head on one side, and gave a whine. “Don’t worry she’s just gone to wait for me. I’m sure she’ll come back and talk to you another day. It’s time for me to go too.”

He closed his eyes and concentrated on exiting. When he opened them again it was to the inside of the headset, which was now dark, and a killer headache. He put up a hand to remove the headset and realised that it was shaking. It was a few moments after that he became aware that he felt like something the cat had dragged in, and probably played with a bit after that just for good measure. He pushed the headset up and blinked at the bright light. It made him feel queasy and his stomach began to rebel. Someone shoved a bowl into his hands, for which he was very grateful, this was going to be embarrassing enough without him puking his guts up on the floor. He deposited the contents of his stomach, which turned out to be very little, in the bowl and followed that up with a series of dry heaves. Another unidentified person put a cup of water in his hand once he seemed to be done and he rinsed his mouth out.

“Feeling better?” asked Archer. His tone was concerned but not overly so.

“Not really,” said Trip. “I’ve got the headache to end all headaches, but give it a moment and I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

“I think you should let me be the judge of that, Captain Tucker,” said Phlox, who had just snapped his scanner shut and was preparing a hypospray. He felt the cold of the medication against his neck, not even bothering to ask what it was. He trusted the doctor to give him something that would make him feel better.

He was finally able to look at the ring of concerned faces around him. T’Pol sat on the floor at his feet, her legs crossed and a smile on her face. He looked back at T’Pol. “You’re smiling,” he said, completely surprised.

“That’s because I’m damn glad that you’re okay,” T’Pol drawled, and then she uncrossed her legs, got to her feet, reached towards him with her good arm and kissed him passionately. He could hear the shocked intakes of breath around him, as he kissed her back. They eventually had to come up for air and broke apart.

Trip smiled back at T’Pol. “You do realise what you’ve just done? As much as I enjoyed it, I’m not sure that demonstrating your affection for me in the middle of Main Engineering was the best idea.”

“This is very touching,” said Reed, “but we do have a rather more pressing concern.”

Trip nodded. “Yeah, the virus on Excalibur. The copy on board Excalibur is like a child of the one here. The program we created should be able to defeat it pretty easily. Just make a copy of Fido and upload it to Excalibur’s computers.”

“Fido?” asked Reed.

“Your program sort of took on a life of its own. We’ve got ourselves a virus watchdog in the system, and I mean an actual dog. I guess it was looking for a form to take and my subconscious sort of decided that it was a guard dog. The heuristic algorithms that we took from your simulation, combined with the Bolian anti-virus program have given it some measure of basic intelligence.”

“Now you’re sounding like T’Pol,” said Archer.

“It is possible for mind melds to have that effect,” said Trip. He noticed that the inflections of his answer were definitely T’Pol’s.

“It should fade with time,” added T’Pol. Her brief smile had disappeared. “My apologies for my earlier actions. They were inappropriate for the commander of this station.”

“Apology accepted, Captain. I think we all understand that mind melds complicate things. Perhaps you and Phlox should take Captain Tucker to sickbay. I think we can handle things from here.” Admiral Archer indicated the computer.

T’Pol gave the Admiral a tilt of her head in acknowledgement.

“I said I was fine,” said Trip.

“Yeah, and we all know what that means. Get out of here, Trip.” Archer didn’t seem to be in the mood for Trip pulling his usual tricks to get out of going to sickbay, so he gave in.

Trip sighed. “Come on then, the sooner I go, the sooner I can get some sleep.”

****

Deep Space One had lost the air of menace that had been all pervading while Cutter had been in control. With the lights back on, it was suddenly their home again. Engineering were going to have their work cut out for them, but at least they’d dispensed with the threat and could now get on with the repair work.

Sickbay was once again brightly lit and a couple of the beds were curtained off and occupied with sleeping individuals. Mostly the room was empty however and things were quiet. Phlox helped Trip onto a biobed near the door, since Trip was rather shaky on his feet and a bit light sensitive. He lay down gratefully and draped an arm over his eyes to block out as much light as possible. Thankfully Phlox noticed and turned the lights down in his corner of sickbay.

“Thanks, Doc,” said Trip.

“You’re welcome, Captain,” replied Phlox, as he examined the readings from the scanner once again.

“While we are here, I would like to discuss another matter with you, Doctor,” said T’Pol.

Phlox closed his scanner. “Captain Tucker seems to be responding well to treatment, so I don’t see why not. What is it, T’Pol? Would you prefer to discuss it in private?”

“This concerns Trip as well,” said T’Pol. She looked a little uncomfortable for a moment and then obviously decided that she should get to the point. “We have been having difficulties with our telepathic communication.”

Phlox frowned. “What sort of difficulties?”

“Trip will have to give you his own experiences but for me it has manifested as a difficulty in establishing contact and in maintaining that contact. It has been very distracting and my normal mental control has slipped.”

“She’s been worried, Doc,” said Trip. Vulcans weren’t supposed to worry because that wouldn’t be logical but when it was something like this it was hard not to. T’Pol would probably never have said that she had been worried. “I guess you could say it’s like getting a bad connection on a com link. I try to contact T’Pol and it takes more work or I can’t hear her at all. Except it sort of seems to get better, especially when we’re in trouble and really need the bond link. All this stuff with Cutter, and we didn’t have a flicker once, except when I was actually plugged into the computer.”

“How long has this problem been going on?” asked Phlox.

“A few days,” said Trip.

“Four days,” corrected T’Pol.

“You should have told me the moment that you experienced trouble. My research on Vulcan bonds, such as I was able to do, suggests that problems with a bond can be an early indicator of several types of illness in one or other of the bond mates. In fact, it can indicate other conditions as well,” said Phlox, a thoughtful look on his face. He opened his scanner once more and ran it over T’Pol.

“Just as I suspected,” Phlox looked back at T’Pol. “To be honest, I’m surprised that you haven’t guessed yourself what is causing the problems. The symptoms are quite common in bonded Vulcans.”

Trip pushed himself onto his side, looked rather confused. “Doc, what are you talking about? What’s wrong with T’Pol?”

Phlox smiled broadly. “Nothing is wrong. T’Pol is pregnant. Let me be the first to offer you my congratulations.”

“That is not possible,” said T’Pol.

Trip’s mouth had dropped open and he was just staring at Phlox. He shook his head as if to shake himself out of his daze. He regretted the action immediately, but soldiered on with what he had been about to say. “Now wait a minute, you told us that if we wanted kids then it would require genetic manipulation to create a viable embryo. T’Pol’s right. It’s just not possible.”

“I assure you, it is and T’Pol is indeed pregnant. Looking at this scan, I would estimate about eight weeks. The disturbance to your telepathic link is an immature telepathic mind, your baby. As you know, Vulcans are touch telepaths. I believe once the baby is born, then your bond will return to normal.”

There was silence for a moment as everyone concerned took in the news.

“You’re absolutely sure?” asked Trip, still unwilling to believe that such a miracle could have happened.

“See for yourself, Captain.” Phlox transferred one of T’Pol’s scan images from the handheld device onto one of the big screens and it clearly showed a tiny embryo.

T’Pol was looking the closest to shocked that Trip had ever seen. Her mind was a chaos of questions. It probably wasn’t helped by the pieces of his own personality that remained resonating in her head.

“But how could this have happened?” asked T’Pol.

“Erm, t’hy’la, I would have thought that was pretty obvious. We haven’t exactly been taking precautions because this wasn’t supposed to be possible.”

T’Pol now positively glared at Trip. “I am aware of how children are produced. I am asking the Doctor if he has a scientific explanation for how we have been able to create a child when all medical science up until this point has suggested that intervention would be required.” Her mind had also given him the mental equivalent of a snarl so he decided to let Phlox answer.

“It is a good question and one that I have some trouble answering. However, I have noticed some small changes in Captain Tucker’s DNA ever since you performed the healing link.”

Trip just stared at Phlox. “What? You’re just telling me this now?”

“The changes are very small and I hadn’t thought it worth mentioning, to be honest with you. It is my belief that when T’Pol used your bond to heal you, she imprinted some of her DNA on you. I suppose that subconsciously she was repairing your body using her own Vulcan blueprint, if you will. It really is a fascinating insight into the Vulcan marriage bond….” Phlox seemed to notice that neither Trip nor T’Pol were looking particularly happy or fascinated in his extended enthusiasm for research into Vulcan mental abilities. “Anyway, it seems to have been enough that you were able to conceive a child. Admittedly it is still an amazing occurrence and one that could be considered a chance in a million.”

Trip just stared at the image on the screen, and slowly a smile spread across his face. “I’ll be damned. We’re going to be parents, T’Pol.”

“Yes, ashayam, we are,” said T’Pol, thoughtfully, and Trip could detect the current of happiness that was underneath her thoughts. She was just as pleased as he was.

****

Trip only stayed in sickbay a few hours. It was long enough for he and T’Pol to begin to get to grips with the idea that they were going to have a baby and for Trip to start to feel more like himself. Unfortunately their good news meant that they were stuck with a slightly malfunctioning telepathic link until the baby was born. Phlox had also mentioned a few other side effects that Vulcan women experienced during pregnancy, mainly due to changing hormones, one of which could explain T’Pol’s loss of concentration whilst he had been in the shower. In fact the pregnancy would also seem to explain T’Pol’s problems sleeping, so that was another mystery solved.

T’Pol persuaded Trip to go back to their quarters to get some sleep, while she returned to C and C. Trip had argued that T’Pol should rest as well, but she had pointed out that she was still in command of Deep Space One and had responsibilities. She didn’t intend to shirk her responsibilities just because she happened to be pregnant. Trip quashed his instinct to protect her, and made do with her promise that she would be back as soon as she had dealt with the immediate aftermath of Cutter’s infiltration of their systems. The anti-virus program, or Fido as it was now being called, had made short work of the copy of Cutter on board Excalibur and the ship was now safely docked once more at Deep Space One. Trip hated to think of how much of their repair work had been undone, and Reed had raced off to find out and check on his crewmates.

Athena had gone to investigate the ship that their sensors had detected. They had found the remains of a Bolian ship, which had been destroyed by an explosion and a considerable amount of cloaking radiation that had a signature very similar to the one given off Romulan technology. From that they had concluded that there had been a Bolian ship there, but one that was equipped by a Romulan cloaking device. It backed up Kathar’s claim of a Bolian alliance with the Romulans. T’Pol suspected that they had been sent to monitor Cutter’s progress and retrieve the virus once it was successful, but it seemed that no confirmation would be forthcoming now.

Trip had just finished showering and getting ready for bed when the door bell rang. He threw on a t-shirt and opened the door to see Admiral Archer.

“Hi Trip,” said Archer. “Sorry to come by unannounced but I wanted to say goodbye before I go.”

Trip ran a tired hand through his slightly damp hair. “You’re leaving already?”

“The Bolians are a bit anxious to leave Deep Space One. Athena’s going to be taking them back to Starbase Two with me and hopefully we’ll be able to thrash out the details of their defection.” Archer was looking almost as tired as he felt.

“Come on in. I think I’ve got a bottle of scotch around here somewhere,” said Trip, turning to go back into his quarters to find some glasses and the bottle. “T’Pol wouldn’t approve, but she’s busy in C and C.”

Archer sat down in one of the dark blue armchairs that sat in the living area of Trip and T’Pol’s quarters. “I guess she’ll let you off just his once. Did you get over your differences about using the computer interface?”

“Ah, I think she sort of forgot about it when Phlox…” Trip trailed off as he poured two glasses of scotch and brought one over for Archer.

“When Phlox what?” asked Archer, accepting the glass from his friend.

T’Pol’s voice resonated in Trip’s head. “You can tell him. He is our friend and we will be needing his services as “best man” shortly.”

Trip couldn’t help but smile at T’Pol’s words as he replied. “This isn’t the middle ages, we don’t have to get married just because you’re pregnant.”

“No, but there is no sense in delaying now that the entire crew are aware of our relationship.”

“Good point,” said Trip. He took a sip of his scotch and then took a deep breath. He looked up at Archer and spoke aloud, unable to contain his grin any longer. “T’Pol’s pregnant.”

Archer’s glass stopped on it’s journey to his mouth. He grinned back at Trip. “Congratulations, that’s fabulous news. I’m really happy for you, Trip. We should be celebrating.”

“Hold your horses. For the moment we’re going to keep it quiet. We need a bit of time for it to sink in, and think through all the consequences. T’Pol’s going to need maternity leave, then there’s where we go once the baby’s born, and probably a whole load of other stuff too.” Trip took a large mouthful of scotch from his glass.

“Sounds wise. I don’t need to tell you that there are people back on Earth who won’t be too happy about the idea of a Vulcan and a Human having a child together, but then, we’re a long way from Earth out here.”

Trip’s good mood evaporated. The memory of Elizabeth, the baby that Terra Prime had created using his and T’Pol’s DNA, had leapt to the front of his mind. They were about to bring another child into a society that hadn’t moved on far from that point. Terra Prime still existed in some form, although not as powerful as it had once been. He wasn’t sure that the Vulcans would welcome the news either.

“We knew having kids wasn’t going to be easy for us,” said Trip.

Archer seemed to understand where Trip’s thoughts had taken him. “We’ve got nine months to work things out. I’ll help you in any way I can.”

“Thanks Admiral, I may well hold you to that. Although actually you’ve got about ten months, Vulcan pregnancies are twelve months long and T’Pol’s already eight weeks gone. Of course that assumes it’ll be the same for a baby that’s half human.”

“I’m sure Phlox will take good care of both mother and baby,” said Archer, finally taking a sip from his own glass.

“I hope so because I don’t have a damn clue what to expect. I’ve got no idea about human babies, so god knows how I’m going to cope with one that’s half Vulcan.”

“You’re going to be a great father, Trip,” said Archer, sincerely. “You and T’Pol can pretty much handle anything together. You’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, I guess we will,” he said, and in his head he could hear T’Pol’s agreement. Life was going to be getting interesting, and he’d have T’Pol there to share it with.

****

The End

****

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