by Dave Stern
It had to be a good ten seconds before they stopped.
“Oh.” Hoshi said, smiling and shaking her head. “Commander, I—”
“Yeah.” He smiled too. “It feels good to do that.”
“Yes.” She nodded.
Trip chuckled. “Oh yes.” He looked her in the eye. “Good God, yes.”
The “yes” came out as more of an exhalation than anything else, because Trip had already started laughing again.
Hoshi was laughing even harder. She grabbed her stomach and bent over, her shoulders shaking.
Even after Trip composed himself, her shoulders were still shaking.
Trip didn’t know exactly how long it took for him to realize that at some point, her laughter had turned into tears.
“Hey. Hoshi, come on.” She didn’t react. He leaned forward and put a hand on her arm. “It’s all right. We’re gonna be—”
She sat up so suddenly Trip started.
“No!” she said, her voice harsh. “It’s not all right, sir. It’s not all right at all. I’m sick of this. Sick of feeling tired all the time. Sick of being stuck in this room. I’m sick of feeling useless, and more than anything else I am sick to death of this god-damn food!”
She shoved the bowl of pisarko away from her. It flew off the table and smacked into the floor, shattering into a hundred pieces.
Hoshi looked at the mess—shards of the plate, clumps of pisarko all mixed together—and suddenly stopped crying. Her eyes widened in horror.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” she said softly.
“Yeah. I know.”
She sighed. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“Hoshi.” He looked her in the eye. “Like I said, it’s all right. Or it will be, anyway. We’ll find Enterprise.”
“Yes, sir.” She smiled ruefully. “Good thing it was just a plate.”
“Good thing.” He nodded.
She sighed, wiped away another tear, and bent to begin picking up the shards.
Trip bent down to help her, mentally adding another item to the “things he didn’t know about Hoshi” list: under the right conditions, she had a powerful temper.
The door to the decontamination chamber opened again.
Doctor Trant stepped through. Neesa.
Trip looked at her and smiled.
She wore the same green-and-orange Guild uniform as Trip and Hoshi. Her gaze traveled from Trip to Hoshi to the mess on the floor and then back to him.
“Everything all right?” she asked, in such a way that Trip knew she had to have heard something of their previous conversation—Hoshi’s rant, most likely.
“Everything’s fine,” Trip said. “Just an accident.”
“My fault,” Hoshi said, kneeling down on the floor. She reached for the shattered pieces of the plate. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Don’t,” Trant interrupted forcefully. “Leave those.”
Hoshi looked up.
“Sharp edges. Last thing we need right now is for you to cut yourself, Hoshi,” Trant said in a very reasonable tone. “I’ll clean it up.”
“I’m not a child,” Hoshi snapped. “I’ll be careful.”
“It’s not a question of being careful. Accidents happen.”
“Doctor—”
“No,” Trant said in a tone that brooked no argument.
Hoshi didn’t argue.
But she didn’t stop what she was doing either.
Piece by piece, scrap by scrap, she picked up the plate and the pisarko and threw them in the trash. Trant fumed.
Hoshi stood next to the bin defiantly when she’d finished.
“That was very foolish,” Trant said.
“Maybe.”
“No maybes about it.” She turned to Trip. “You said ‘early afternoon.’ It’s dinnertime.”
He smacked himself on the forehead. The medical ward.
“I’m sorry. I forgot completely.”
“What’s the matter?” Hoshi asked.
“Commander Tucker was going to come by so I could run a few more tests.”
“But we just did tests. Last night.”
“The results were…at odds with what I expected to find. On both of you.” Trant frowned. “In fact, as long as I’m here, I’d like to take a little more blood from you, Hoshi. Just to have a point of comparison.”
Hoshi sighed, and seemed to deflate. All at once, she looked completely done in.
“Doctor,” Trip said gently, “why don’t you start with me now, and do Hoshi later? How would that be?”
Please, he added silently.
Trant caught the message in his eyes. “I suppose. But you’re not interchangeable. So first thing after dinner, I’ll be back. All right, Hoshi?”
“That’s fine. Thank you, Doctor,” Hoshi replied. Her eyes thanked Trip as well.
“Not a problem.” He got to his feet. “Come on, Doc. Let’s get this over with.”
“Trip…”
Trant shook her head and pointed to the plateful of pisarko he’d left on the table.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he mumbled, and sat back down.
Trant got out another plate and filled it for Hoshi. She pulled out a chair and joined them.
“Well, what are you waiting for?”
Trip smiled.
Hoshi smiled.
They burst out laughing again.
“At least someone around here’s in a good mood.”
Trant had waited until they’d passed through the decontamination chamber before speaking.
“Not exactly a good mood,” Trip replied. “More like a desperate one.” He ran down Hoshi’s litany of complaints for the doctor. “The one about feeling useless, that’s the big one, I think. At least before, when we thought that contacting Starfleet might make a difference, she had something to do. Now…”
Neesa nodded thoughtfully. “You’ll have to find something else to keep her occupied.”
“Something meaningful,” Trip said.
“That she can do alone, in her cabin, without extended periods of contact with any of the crew.”
“Needlepoint, maybe.” He smiled and shook his head. His momma had done needlepoint almost every night after supper.
Trant looked puzzled.
“It’s a hobby. Like making…” He thought, “…art.”
“Is Hoshi an artist?”
He shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Neesa said.
“I’m drawing a blank right now.”
They walked on.
“These tests you want to run again,” Trip said. “What are they?”
“Body chemistry studies.”
“You weren’t happy with the last round?”
“No.”
“Why? What did they say?”
“Nothing that made sense,” she told him. “That’s why I want to run them again.”
“Come on, Neesa. What did they say?”
She paused a moment before answering.
“The tests indicated that the rate of mineral depletion…is occurring faster than I had originally predicted. Much faster.”
“Which means—”
“The trace minerals that your body needs to function optimally are at very low levels in your system. Somehow, they’re being—well, for lack of a better word, leeched out.”
Leeched. Trip shuddered involuntarily at the images the word brought up.
“It may be,” Trant continued, “that there are compounds in the pisarko responsible for this process. That’s one of the reasons I want to run the tests again—to see exactly what’s happening. Also to make sure that the results I got last time were correct.”
Trip frowned. “Same basic results in me and Hoshi, though?”
“That’s right.”
“So what are the odds that both sets of tests are wrong?”
He saw the answer to that in her eyes before she spoke.
“Not high, but still…it’
s worth eliminating that possibility. Before we have to do more expansive testing.”
Trip sighed. He was getting almost as sick as Hoshi of being a guinea pig.
Trant put a hand on his shoulder.
“Trip, these tests won’t take long, I promise. And we need to do them—there may be some things we can do to head off the symptoms.”
“Symptoms like what?”
“Dizziness, fainting, unexplained cramping, feelings of weakness—”
He nodded. “Something I should have told you about before, I suppose,” he said hesitantly, and then filled her in on the pains he’d experienced the previous night.
Trant was quiet after he’d finished.
“Well. It seems that those results may have been correct after all. Though another round of tests still might—”
“No.” Trip stopped walking. “I don’t think we really need another round. Do you?”
She sighed, and nodded reluctantly. “No, I suppose not. There’s no news about your ship, I take it?”
“No.”
“There’s time,” she said, and started walking again. “Even with this, there’s time. I’ll let Kairn know. He may be able to shift more personnel to the decoding stations. Your ship is out there, it’s just a matter of—”
“Neesa.” Trip hadn’t moved a muscle, was still standing in the exact same spot where he’d stopped. She hadn’t noticed.
She turned now to face him.
“How much time?” he asked. “How much time do Hoshi and I have?”
“That’s hard to say. There are a lot of factors involved.”
“When we first found out about all this, you said months.”
“I know.”
“We’re not talking about months anymore though, are we?”
She shook her head. “No. Certainly not for Hoshi. For you…if these test results are right…if the rate of depletion continues to accelerate…if—”
“Neesa.”
She looked up at him.
“Just tell me.”
She shut her eyes a second, and shook her head.
“Six weeks,” she said, sighing again. “That’s the high end. A month, on the other side, if—”
Trip held up a hand. He didn’t want to hear the rest.
“Okay,” he said, nodding. “A month.”
Thirty days, more or less. Long before then, of course, he’d be bedridden. Incapable of getting to Enterprise even if they found it. And what was true for him would no doubt be true for the rest of the crew. In a month, they’d all be dead.
“Trip”—Trant took one of his hands and squeezed it between hers—“we’re going to find your ship. I know it.”
But suddenly, despite his own words of encouragement to Hoshi earlier, he wasn’t so sure. All this time, all those intercepts sorted through, and they still didn’t have a clue. And now, for all intents and purposes, the amount of time they had left could be measured in days.
They had to do something.
And all at once, it was crystal clear to him exactly what that something was.
“Hoshi and I have to go.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we have to go. Get in the cell-ship, and find Enterprise ourselves.”
Trant blinked.
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Go where? You don’t have a clue where to start looking. And those aches you’re feeling now, those cramps? They’re only going to get worse. Exponentially worse.”
“I believe you,” he said.
She shook her head. “You can’t fly in that kind of pain.”
“That’s why there’s an autopilot.”
“Trip, be serious. What if you get sick? What if Hoshi gets sicker? How can you expect to take care of her if you’re incapacitated?”
“We’ll find a way. We’ll have to.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. You’re the doctor—help us.”
“I want to help. Assisted suicide is not my idea of help.”
“I seem to recall you passing out poison pills not too long ago.”
She frowned. “That was different.”
“No, that was exactly the same. You wanted me to have those pills in case I got caught by Sadir’s people, so I’d have a chance to die on my own terms.” He put his hands on her shoulders and looked her straight in the eye. “That’s all I plan on doing. Giving myself that same chance.”
She shook her head. “But you don’t have to make that choice just yet. There are still things—”
“Neesa,” he cut her off, “that’s wrong. I have to make the choice now. While I still can.”
“What about Hoshi? You’re going to make that decision for her too?”
“No. I’ll give her the choice.” He nodded down the corridor, back the way they’d come. “But I think I know what she’ll say.”
Neesa stared into his eyes a moment without responding.
A Guild crewman wandered past. He looked at them curiously before continuing on his way. Trip would normally have pulled his hands away from her shoulders, made it look like they were just friends talking, but right at the moment he didn’t care about all that.
“I’ll tell Kairn you’re too sick to go. That you’re irrational. That—”
“He wouldn’t believe it. And even if he would…” Trip shook his head. “You’d never do that.”
She lowered her gaze.
“No, I wouldn’t. Trip…”
“Neesa.” He touched her cheek gently and tilted her head toward his. “Try and understand.”
“I do understand. I’m just not happy, that’s all.”
“Yeah, well…neither am I.” Not about leaving her, anyway. He was just the opposite, in fact. Miserable.
All at once, that old saying popped into his head again, and he smiled.
“What?”
He told her.
She sighed. “I suppose that’s true. I could certainly use some company now.”
“That sounds like an invitation.”
She nodded.
“As long as we’re not going to the ward,” Trip said, “I’m your man.”
“For one more night,” she said, managing a smile.
Trip nodded. “One more night.”
They joined hands and headed off down the corridor.
Five
“THEREFORE,” T’POL SAID, sitting back in her chair, “this is the only logical conclusion.”
Stunned silence greeted her pronouncement.
Phlox was the first to find his voice. “Astounding. Unsettling. Sub-Commander, forgive me, but…could you go through your reasoning one more time? I want to understand—exactly—how you arrived at this conclusion.”
T’Pol looked to the captain. He gave her a quick go-ahead nod. Truth be told, Archer could use the time to fully absorb the implications of her discovery.
The three of them were gathered around a small table in what had once served as a canteen for Rava One’s guards, a room right off the main cargo bay, where the Denari vessel they’d just commandeered was being prepared for their use.
No sooner had they finished clearing the ship of soldiers than T’Pol had appeared with what she’d deemed urgent news. She’d asked Archer to have Doctor Phlox join them in the nearest available room to hear it.
Urgent, he decided now, was an understatement.
“As you wish, Doctor,” T’Pol said. “To repeat. When I was first brought to Colonel Gastornis, he told me his superiors wanted as much information on Vulcan activities within the neighboring star systems as possible. I offered to identify the nearest Vulcan outposts to him, as a way of avoiding his…wrath.”
Which was one of the blandest euphemisms for torture the captain had ever heard. Torture, T’Pol hadn’t entirely avoided, as evidenced by the green welts along both her arms.
“Of course, I had no intention of doing any such thing. My plan was to use the prison’s sensors not t
o find the outposts, but to signal them with our whereabouts, in the hope they would mount a rescue. However, in the course of attempting to locate those garrisons, I ran into some unexpected difficulties.”
“Involving those…T’ronn Equations you were talking about,” the captain supplied.
“T’ronna Equations,” T’Pol corrected. “Yes. Those equations set forth a series of unchanging physical constants, which form the basis of much Vulcan astrophysical science. S’ral’s Theorem, the Shi’Kahr Principles—”
“Hold on a minute, T’Pol,” the captain said. “As long as you’re going over this again—this is where I lost you last time.”
T’Pol frowned. “Perhaps if I eliminate the references to Vulcan scientific theory, and speak in terms of human traditions?”
“Couldn’t hurt,” Archer said.
The Vulcan nodded. “Very well, then. Are you familiar with the Hubble Constant?”
“Sure,” the captain said. Phlox, he saw, was frowning.
“Named after a twentieth-century astronomer, I believe,” Archer continued. “Sets forth the rate of the universe’s expansion.”
“Exactly,” T’Pol replied.
“Ah.” The Denobulan smiled. “Parnikee’s Theorem.”
Both of them looked at him.
“Parnikee. You’ve never heard of Parnikee?” Phlox shook his head in amazement. “Most peculiar. I would think he warranted mention in any survey of the galaxy’s great scientists. Not only did he invent the matter/antimatter engine on our world, but he led the first Denobulan exploratory vessel—”
Archer held up a hand. “We get the point, Doctor. T’Pol?”
“Yes. To continue, the Hubble Constant, for all intents and purposes, is the same as T’Ronna’s third equation. As Parnikee’s Theorem, Doctor.”
“As I said,” Phlox responded.
“That number is useful in a multitude of applications. In this case, I used it to help calculate the location of the nearest Vulcan outpost. Rather, I should say I tried to use it. To make a long story short, I failed.”
She looked around the table.
“I tried again. And failed again. I repeated this process so many times that the colonel grew frustrated with me, and…”
Archer nodded. She didn’t need to fill in that particular blank.
