by Dave Stern
“I of course anticipate your mission will be successful. But we must be realistic, sir. If something disastrous does occur—”
The ship, of course, chose that moment to shudder again, even more violently. More evasive maneuvers. Not explosions, thankfully, but the boy didn’t know that, and suddenly looked another shade paler to the captain.
“Thirty seconds,” Duel said.
“We can’t talk about this now,” the captain said, casting a meaningful glance toward Lee.
T’Pol frowned. “There is, obviously, no other time we can talk about it, sir. Now as I was saying…”
Archer sighed. There was no stopping her, clearly.
“If you do not return, and we do not recover the data we need, I wish your permission to proceed to the nearest Vulcan outpost and use their facilities to search for ways back to our own universe.”
The captain considered her request a moment.
“Sir?” she asked.
“We’ll talk about it later,” he said.
“Later? Sir, as I said previously, there is no—”
Archer caught Duel’s eyes then. The ensign nodded.
“Later,” he said firmly, and then stood stock-still as the transporter beam took him.
To Archer’s satisfaction, they had successfully calculated to within a meter: they materialized in the very back of the huge hall Elson had spoken to them from earlier.
It was even bigger than the captain had thought, from his brief glimpse of it on Enterprise’s viewscreen. A vast dome, hidden somewhere inside the heart of the Kresh. Within it, several dozen rows of stepped horseshoe-shaped desks, each occupied by black-clad soldiers, Elson’s forces, and other men and women dressed in what he took for civilian clothes, the powerless delegates of the Presidium.
Those in power sat not in the hall, but at the very front of the chamber. Fourteen of them, on a raised dais, facing outward toward the others. The Council.
There was a fifteenth chair as well, at the center of the dais, that stood empty. Sadir’s old chair, Archer guessed.
Just in front of the dais was an elaborately carved wooden podium, visible as well on three huge video monitors, each easily twice the size of Enterprise’s main viewer, suspended high above the chamber floor.
As Archer and Lee watched, General Elson rose from one of the fourteen seats, stepped up to the podium, and began to speak.
“My fellow officers. Members of the Presidium,” he began. “You do me great honor by your presence here today. Your strength is my strength. Together, we will lead our planet to peace. As General Sadir would have wanted.”
Applause—muted, polite applause—greeted his words. Among those clapping, Archer saw Colonel Wooler at the far end of the dais. The man’s face was impassive—the captain couldn’t read him at all.
He hoped they’d judged him correctly, or he was going to wish he’d talked things out with T’Pol while he’d had the chance.
“Go,” the captain whispered to Lee.
Two soldiers flanked the aisle Lee had to walk down to reach the front of the chamber. At the sound of the captain’s voice, they turned.
“Who are you?” one said, stepping forward. “What are you doing…”
His voice trailed off as he recognized Lee.
“Go,” Archer said again, before the soldier had a chance to react.
The boy started to walk. He got a good four meters before the first head turned to look at him. Another meter before the whispers started.
By the time he was halfway down the aisle, the entire chamber was buzzing. On the screen, Elson faltered momentarily. He looked up, saw Lee, and for a split second, his expression darkened. Then he broke out into a broad smile.
“My friends,” he said. “A miracle. Leeman Sadir.”
The general threw his arms wide and stepped off the dais toward the boy.
He was the first—but not the only one—to embrace him. It seemed as if everyone in the chamber, soldiers and Council members and civilians alike, wanted to touch Lee, see him, assure themselves that the boy was really there with them. The boy himself was smiling, his eyes moist, as he accepted their greetings. Wooler had maneuvered himself next to Lee, was almost holding him up as the crowd continued to gather around him.
Archer’s eyes scanned the room, and he saw that Elson, who’d stepped back from the crowd, was now talking to one of his soldiers, his hand cupped over the man’s ear. Plotting.
The captain began to circle around the back of the huge hall, keeping his gaze fixed on the man Elson was talking to, trying at the same time not to draw attention to himself.
Elson resumed his position at the podium and raised his arms for quiet.
“Everyone, please,” he said, as the delegates took their seats. “I suggest that in light of Leeman’s return, we postpone our decision for at least—”
The boy, who was still standing just below the dais, engaged in conversation with Colonel Wooler, took a sudden step up. It put him right alongside Elson.
The general, all at once, looked uncomfortable. He tried to cover by embracing Lee again.
The boy stiffened and broke his hold.
Here we go, Archer thought, and opened his communicator.
“Archer to Enterprise.”
“Right here,” Trip’s voice shot back. “Captain, where the hell have you been? We’ve—”
“We cut it a little closer than we thought. You getting this?”
“Loud and clear, but—”
“Start transmitting,” Archer said. “Let’s hope they hear.”
“Aye, sir,” Trip said.
Leaving the channel open, Archer looked to the podium again. Lee had started to speak.
“With all due respect, General,” the boy said, “I believe it imperative that the Council continue this session. That we take up the issue of war—or peace—immediately.”
It was Elson’s turn to stiffen.
“Lee,” he said, trying to maintain the smile on his face. “I can only guess what you’ve been through these last few days. Let us postpone the session—postpone only, mind you—and give you a chance to recuperate. A few hours. That’s all.”
A few hours, during which Leeman Sadir would no doubt meet with some sort of accident. Or simply vanish into the vastness of the Kresh, never to be heard from again.
Lee shook his head. “No, sir. With all due respect, we have a brief window of time here—a chance to make peace. We have to seize it.”
Elson sighed. “Lee, we talked about this before. After Charest, there is no making peace with the Guild.”
“I don’t believe the Guild was necessarily responsible for what happened there.”
“I have evidence.” That was Wooler, who was approaching the podium. “I’ve told you this, Leeman.”
“I’d like to see it. I’d like to know what kind of evidence it is. Hard evidence or someone’s word?”
Archer smiled, hearing his own words come back to him.
He smiled a second time at the obvious discomfort he saw on both Wooler’s and Elson’s faces as they listened to the boy.
“Before we start a war on someone’s word, we should talk to them. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Talk to the Guild?” Elson almost spat out the words. “Never. They are not to be trusted.”
“What about General Makandros? Is he not to be trusted as well?”
“This is not what your father would have wanted, Lee.”
“All due respect—no one can know what my father would have wanted, General. He’s dead. The rest of us—we just have to carry on as best we can.”
The hall fell suddenly, eerily silent as the two—General Elson and Leeman Sadir—faced off at each other, the empty fifteenth seat on the dais behind them.
“I have every confidence in General Makandros,” the boy said. “In the Guild as well, for that matter. They, above all else, desire peace. I place my fate in their hands gladly.”
More of Archer’s w
ords, coming back to him. Words that were hopefully reaching other ears at this moment.
“We’ll talk about this later,” Elson said. He nodded toward the soldier he’d spoken to earlier, who stepped forward now and took Lee’s arm.
That answered the only remaining question Archer had about Elson.
If the general couldn’t achieve his desired goal peacefully, he had no qualms about using whatever force was necessary to get what he wanted. Whatever mess resulted from that force…
He’d clean it up later. Or not.
Archer walked forward calmly then, drawing his weapon and talking into the communicator at the same instant.
“Trip,” he said.
“Sir?”
“The nearest Vulcan outpost,” the captain said. “That’s where you need to go if we can’t get that sensor data. T’Pol—”
Archer stopped in mid-sentence, because on the screen, he saw Lee try to shrug free of the soldier’s grasp. The man grasped his arm harder and began to drag him physically away from the podium.
Wooler stepped in front of him.
“Release the boy,” the colonel said. “Now.”
“Hold him.” Elson stepped between the two men, drawing his own weapon then.
Wooler looked from the General to Leeman Sadir, and then at the soldier holding the boy.
At that instant, static crackled over the assembly hall’s com system.
“This is General Makandros,” a voice sounded, from everywhere and nowhere at once. “I wish to address the Council—immediately.”
Archer smiled as the excited buzz of conversation broke out once more in the chamber. Trip had done it—managed to reach the Guild/DEF fleet and broadcast what was happening down here to them, courtesy of his communicator.
Elson’s face, up until that second the image of stoicism, cracked.
“Leeman Sadir is right to trust the Guild,” Makandros’s voice boomed out. “Because—”
Who moved first then, Archer could never be sure.
Elson, realizing that all his plans were about to come to naught, or the soldier he’d tasked with dragging Leeman Sadir away from the assembly. Both men, all at once, had their weapons pointed directly at Leeman Sadir.
There was no question, though, about who moved fastest.
Wooler was a blur on the dais.
He drew not one, but two weapons, and fired.
Elson and his lackey both crumpled to the ground.
So much for last-second rescues, Archer thought, and holstered his own weapons again.
“Is anyone there?” Makandros’s voice filled the chamber again. “What’s going on?”
Wooler stepped to the podium, and pressed a button there.
“One moment, General.”
Wooler turned to Leeman Sadir then, and exchanged a look with the boy. Then he walked to the empty fifteenth chair, and pulled it out for him.
As Leeman Sadir sat, the Council first, and then the entire assembly, broke out into applause.
“Sir?” Trip’s voice came over the communicator. “Everything all right down there?”
Archer’s eyes sought out—and found—those of Duvall’s son. For a second, the two shared a smile.
“Right as rain, Commander,” Archer said.
Epilogue
BRODESSER SHOOK his head and straightened.
“I could spend a year with that drive,” he said to Trip, gesturing toward the cell-ship. “And at the end of it, I think I still might not have any better idea exactly how it works.”
“We’ve had almost that long already, and haven’t even gotten as far as you.” Trip was less surprised at this than the professor—after all, he knew it was the product of twenty-fourth-century technology. Brodesser didn’t.
Makandros had sent a Stinger for the professor and the rest of the Daedalus crew. They were leaving Enterprise now, on their way to assist the survivors of the Charest explosion, who included General Dirsch. Makandros and Kairn had made contact with him earlier, as Trip had suspected, and had been planning to join their forces with his. To confront Elson, and hopefully force him if to not surrender power, then at least to abandon his plans to extend it.
None of which mattered now.
What mattered was getting supplies and medical assistance to the wounded and dying at Charest. Phlox had released a number of stores—those that closely mirrored the native pisarko—which now lay stacked alongside the Stinger.
Among those supplies was also the subspace beacon Brodesser had begun modifying earlier, during their failed attempt to broach the anomaly.
Now they intended to use it to contact Starfleet. Their Starfleet.
“Good luck working with that, anyway,” Trip said, nodding toward the beacon.
“That is technology we understand,” the professor said. “I don’t think it’ll take long at all to modify it in such a way that we can reach Starfleet.” He smiled. “Any bets on which ship answers our signal?”
Trip returned his grin. “If it is Enterprise, treat me kindly, sir.”
“Of course. Good-bye, Trip.”
“Good-bye, sir. It was good to meet you.”
“And it was good to see you again, Commander.”
The two men shared a smile, and shook hands.
“I see,” the captain said, staring at the woman on the screen. “Well, you can let him know I was trying to reach him. I will try again later.”
The woman nodded, and without so much as a word of farewell, closed the circuit.
The captain leaned back in his chair and frowned.
Archer was in his ready room, where he’d come after the Council meeting—after a short stop in sickbay to have his prostheses removed. The captain had spent the last few hours talking privately with his senior staff, and with Makandros and Kairn, and attempting, when he could find time, to reach Leeman Sadir. None of those attempts had been successful.
The boy was very busy indeed. Trapped in the third special session of the Council the captain knew of. That was, Archer supposed, a good sign.
It meant that Makandros and Kairn had kept their promise—a promise they’d given to Archer after Elson’s death, a promise not to expose the boy as human, to see that those under their command who knew did not betray that knowledge either.
The captain knew, of course, that the truth would come out. Sooner, rather than later. He only hoped that the general’s fears proved misplaced, that the revelation, when it came, would mean little.
Lee also seemed to be aware that his days as General Sadir’s “son” were numbered. He had already taken Colonel Wooler into his confidence, a conversation the captain had been present at. To his—and Lee’s—relief, the man had taken the news stoically. As he seemed to take everything.
“Blood matters,” Wooler had said. “But you have been your own man now for some time, Lee. This changes nothing.”
It certainly didn’t change how the man treated him. Archer only hoped others would follow suit, when the time came. Thankfully, Lee was too busy with other matters to concern himself overly with the future now.
And speaking of other matters…
The captain had some of his own to attend to as well.
It was time—past time, in fact, as he’d told T’Pol earlier—to bring everyone on Enterprise up to speed on the dilemma facing them: the lack of sensor data that would enable them to return safely to their own universe.
Archer decided to share the knowledge with his junior officers privately, making them responsible for communicating it to their respective departments—passing it along as a problem to be solved, not a pronouncement of doom, as he feared a ship-wide announcement would be interpreted.
He found a few of the people he was looking for—Lieutenants Hess and O’Neill, Chief Lee, and to his surprise, Hoshi, who he’d thought was still confined to quarters—in the mess, eating a late dinner.
As he approached the table, backs straightened. All eyes went to the captain.
“Mind i
f I join you for a minute?”
Without waiting for a response, he pulled up a chair and sat, launching into an explanation of their problem—the missing data. About the failed attempt to communicate with the Denari back in their universe, how he now wanted any and all thoughts from them and their subordinates about ways to obtain the information they needed.
“Something occurs to me right away,” Hess said when he’d finished. “We ought to make certain that the sensors themselves—and not the relays indicating their status—actually failed.”
“Good point,” the captain said. “Have second shift get on it.”
“I’ll take charge of that, sir,” O’Neill volunteered. “Put my shift on it right now, in fact.”
Archer nodded again. That would certainly make things go quicker.
“Excuse me—Captain?”
“Hoshi?”
She set down her fork, and shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Sir…I have a way to get that data. I think.”
“You do?” Archer frowned.
“Yes Captain.” For some reason, Hoshi was blushing.
“Well? What is it?”
“The cell-ship.”
“The cell-ship?” The captain frowned. “What about the cell-ship?”
“I…” She looked down at her plate. “While we were prepping for launch, I accidentally switched on the sensors. The data we need is in there, I’m sure of it.”
“Wait a minute.” Archer wanted to make sure he understood what she was saying. “The cell-ship’s sensors were on?”
She nodded.
“Before you launched?”
“Yes sir,” she replied, and then, all in a rush. “It’s kind of embarrassing, sir. I made a stupid mistake while I was hooking up the com relay, and I know by now I should—”
“Whoa. Hoshi.” Archer held up a hand. “Please. Don’t apologize. This is the best news I’ve had all day.”
Hoshi went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “I’ll definitely spend a little extra time with Commander Tucker on basic interface design, sir, so that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again. Even though it is good news sir, I know I shouldn’t—”
