Not that he was the type to wallow in nostalgia when there was so much work to be done building tomorrow. It was convenient for people to think that was the reason for his occasional after-hours visits to the ship: to walk its corridors with only his beloved dog for company and reflect on the life he’d left behind. But no; this was where he came for his infrequent meetings with a certain individual, meetings that had to be kept off the books but which provided Archer with valuable insights.
Indeed, when Porthos grew edgy and retreated around the helm console, Archer knew his source had arrived. The man had a way of getting into a room without anyone detecting his approach. Archer turned to face the person who stood in the shadows of the situation-room alcove at the rear of the bridge, his dark suit helping him blend into them. “Admiral,” the man said before Archer even finished turning.
“Your information was good,” Archer told him. “Did you know it was the Malurians behind it?”
“We weren’t sure enough to confirm it.”
“Or you couldn’t tell me what you knew without giving away something I’m not supposed to know.”
“Maybe,” his source admitted. “But you managed pretty well even without that little detail.”
“I guess we did. Hopefully the truth about what happened will keep the real Suliban refugees from being persecuted. We owe you a lot—” He broke off. “I still don’t know what to call you these days.”
The other man smiled. “When it comes to old friends, I still answer to ‘Trip.’ ”
Archer smiled back and nodded, a bit uneasily. In some ways, the man he’d known for so many years as Charles “Trip” Tucker III was still the same good-natured, unassuming, inventive man he’d always been. But his years as an intelligence agent, working for a section of Starfleet Command so secretive that it officially didn’t exist, had changed him. He was very controlled when it came to what he showed on his face, and when Archer did glimpse an unguarded emotion in his eyes, they often seemed haunted.
“Trip,” he went on. “I’m grateful for the help. But I have to say, I’m still uneasy not knowing how you got your information. Why can’t you tell me that?”
“Don’t you trust me, Jonathan?” Trip answered glibly.
“I trust you,” he replied, though he would have said it with more conviction if Trip had trusted him just now. “But I trust you to follow orders. And I don’t particularly trust the people who are giving you your orders.”
“I know our methods aren’t exactly kosher. Hell, that’s the whole point of Section 31 of the Starfleet Charter. Extraordinary measures when nothing else will get the job done.”
“In times of extreme threat,” Archer countered. “For something like the Xindi Crisis or the Romulan War, I could see it. But I don’t see why thugs like the Malurians couldn’t have been exposed through more conventional channels.”
“They coulda been, but they weren’t. Isn’t it enough that you stopped them?”
Archer sighed, unable to refute the sentiment. “I just . . . I worry about you, Trip. I don’t like what this agency is doing to you.” He went on after a thoughtful pause. “Why not come back to Starfleet? You only faked your death so you could infiltrate the Romulans. There’s no more reason not to let your family know, let Hoshi and Travis know, that you’re still alive. They still miss you, Trip.”
Trip was quiet for a time, and Archer feared he’d retreat into enigma once again. But finally the younger man spoke. “I’ve thought about it a hundred times. But I always come to the same answer. They’ve had seven years to get used to me bein’ dead and move on. It’d hurt them too much to open those old wounds.”
“They’d be glad to see you. To know you’re okay.”
“But I’m not!” He looked away, taking a deep breath to regain his control. “That is . . . I’m not the Trip they knew. Not anymore. The things I’ve seen these past seven years, the things I’ve lived through . . . the things I’ve had to do to survive. . . .” He shook his head. “I couldn’t face them. Couldn’t pretend to be the man they remember.”
Archer waited, but Trip said nothing more. “Like at the Battle of Cheron?” he prompted gently. Only silence met him. “Trip, are you ever going to tell me how you survived that escape pod blowing up?”
For a time, after learning of Trip’s escape from a Romulan ship and the subsequent destruction of his pod, Archer had feared that the death report he had fraudulently filed years earlier had finally become true. Eventually Trip had renewed contact, but since then, Archer sometimes feared that he’d lost his friend at that battle after all. He was so different now, more subdued and closed off. Something troubled him, and he refused to confide in his old friend about it. Archer suspected that it was linked with whatever had befallen Trip at Cheron.
But Trip was no more ready to reveal the truth now. “You wouldn’t understand, Jonathan. You can’t know what I’ve been through, how I think now, and neither can they. And I don’t want ’em to know. They don’t deserve that. Let them remember me as I was.
“Trip Tucker really did die seven years ago. And he ain’t ever comin’ back.”
October 4, 2162
San Francisco Navy Yards Orbital Facility
Travis Mayweather was glad the newly minted Captain Malcolm Reed had invited him to pilot the inspection pod for his tour of the U.S.S. Pioneer, which hovered inside an orbital spacedock frame while a Starfleet engineering team completed its refits. He’d always found the Intrepid class an endearingly clunky breed, its makeshift nature reminding him of the Earth Cargo Service freighters he’d spent the first two decades of his life on and around. An Intrepid was basically the front half of an NX/Columbia-class saucer plus a bit more, tapering back from the centerline in a Y shape whose “tail” section contained the warp drive. The nacelles, mounted to the engine tail with delta-shaped struts like those of an NX but smaller, were in so close that their forward Bussard-collector assemblies actually rested atop the half-saucer—necessitating an extra pair of cooling fins extending from the nacelle sides farther aft so that the occupied sections underneath the nacelle caps didn’t grow uncomfortably hot. Mayweather imagined they must still get pretty noisy when the warp coils were running near their peak, but those sections were mainly cargo and hangar bays.
The tightly packed design allowed for a compact, relatively low-power warp bubble, enabling the ships to go faster with less power expenditure. The Intrepid class had started out as a backup plan to repurpose NX-class components for ships that could get up to warp 3 or 3.5 in case the warp-5 engine program had been a failure. But even though that program had succeeded, Earth Starfleet had seen no reason to let that hard work go to waste, and Intrepid herself was put in service within two years of Enterprise’s launch. She and her classmates had been a valuable contribution to the Earth fleet in the year of the Xindi Crisis and afterward.
“With the new engine core,” Captain Reed was telling him enthusiastically as the inspection pod drifted under the ship’s tail section, “we should be able to get Pioneer up to warp five-point-six in a pinch.”
“Amazing,” Travis breathed. “And with that tight warp silhouette, maneuvering should be a breeze. You made the right call, picking Ensign Tallarico. She’s a great pilot. Trained her myself on the Discovery.”
“Why do you think I chose her? You’d like Doctor Liao, too. She’s a space boomer herself. Born and raised on the Ibn Battuta.”
“Captain Hussein’s ship?” Mayweather whistled. “That’s one of the oldest cargo freighters out there. I could tell you stories.”
“I’ve already gotten more than a few from Therese herself.”
Mayweather shook his head. “What gets me is that you picked a Tellarite as your comm officer.”
Reed chuckled. “I was skeptical at first myself. But Ensign Grev’s quite the sociologist as well as a linguist. He’s well-studied in other species’ forms of courtesy and tact, and unfailingly polite on duty.” He grinned. “Mind you, he’s still prop
erly rude and insulting to his family and friends back home.”
They shared a laugh. “And I hear you’re thinking of Alan Sheehan for chief engineer?”
“Well, I couldn’t pry Michel away from Endeavour. But Sheehan’s got experience with this class going all the way back to Intrepid herself . . . although he’s still getting up to speed on the new engine.”
The pod was flying over one of the nacelle caps now, and Mayweather shook his head. “Warp five-point-six. Amazing. I still remember the first time we broke warp five. We thought we were on a milk run to ferry a Vulcan ambassador, and we ended up getting chased halfway across the sector by a bunch of Mazarite gangsters who didn’t want her to testify against them!” Reed nodded. He’d been there at the time, of course, but he’d long since gotten used to Travis’s fondness for spinning a good yarn. Growing up on the Horizon, spending months or years crawling between ports at warp one-point-I-think-I-can, there’d often been little to do but tell each other stories everyone already knew. The trick was to make it interesting anyway. “Talk about a game of interstellar chicken. We were overheating our engines, they were overheating their engines, and it wasn’t so much a race to see who was fastest as to see who blew up last. I tell ya, whatever those crooks wanted to hide must’ve been really terrible, since they pushed themselves right to the edge, warp four-point-nine-five. But Captain Archer said, ‘It is called a warp five engine,’ and Commander Tucker said, ‘Yeah, on paper!’ ” They shared a laugh. “I was never so scared to push that throttle forward. I was sure I was gonna get the whole crew killed.”
“But you didn’t,” Reed told him. “You were the first human being ever to pilot a starship above warp five. How does it feel to know your place in the history books is assured for all time?”
“I don’t know, Mal—uh, Captain. I prefer not to look at it that way. I’d like to think I’ve still got some major accomplishments waiting for me in the future.”
Reed studied him. “I’m glad you feel that way, Travis. Because Pioneer still needs a first officer.”
Mayweather looked at him for a moment—and when he realized what the captain meant, he was so startled he almost swung the pod into the side of the drydock lattice. “Sir? You mean me?”
“It’s only a two-person pod.”
“But I’m just a lieutenant!”
“And I was just a commander a week ago. I’m happy to spread the wealth. And it’s a small ship, only forty-six crew—it’s not unusual for the first officer to be of lieutenant commander’s rank.”
“Even so, do you really think I’m ready for it? There must be other, more experienced officers. . . .”
“Travis, you’ve got all the qualifications you need. You gained a wealth of experience on different ships during the war, served with a number of different crews.”
“And kept getting my ships shot out from under me.”
“And survived every time, and came away wiser for it.” Reed fidgeted. “But there’s more to it than that. You fit into all those crews because you’re good with people. And . . . as you know, that’s not a big part of my particular skill set. It isn’t easy for me to . . . overcome my natural reserve with new people.”
“I don’t know, you did fine with me.”
“Which was largely because you made the effort to reach out to me. That’s your gift. And that’s what I need, Travis. I need a first officer who can relate to the crew, bond with them. Who can be my bridge to them. And I need it to be someone I trust . . . someone I already consider a close friend.”
Mayweather was quiet for a long moment. He and Malcolm had been friends for a long time, and the latter had shown it many times through his actions, but had rarely chosen to put it into words. Travis respected his natural reticence, understood that he just communicated differently. But that just made it all the more moving that he’d finally come out and said it.
Mayweather extended his hand and spoke solemnly. “I would be honored, sir. I accept.”
Reed gave his hand a firm, curt shake. “Welcome aboard, Lieutenant Commander Mayweather.”
3
October 13, 2162
U.S.S. Essex NCC-173, Psi Serpentis system
“YOU’RE FIDGETING AGAIN, COMMISSIONER,” said Captain Bryce Shumar.
The Federation Commissioner for Foreign Affairs stiffened slightly and threw the mustachioed captain a look. “Vulcans do not fidget, Captain. I am . . . uneasy with this assignment.”
“You’ve made that clear enough by now, Soval. But we’re here,” Shumar went on, gesturing at the water-rich Minshara-class planet on the Essex bridge’s forward viewscreen, the fourth planet of its yellow primary star. He spoke in a dialect characteristic of the Earth island of Great Britain, while his complexion and facial structure indicated that he was one of the many inhabitants of that island whose ancestors had come from the Indian subcontinent. “Close enough that the Saurians have probably detected our approach by now. It’s a little late to turn back.”
Saurians, Soval thought, finding the term an awkward placeholder. He supposed the origins of the term were logical enough; the lacertilian bipeds native to this world were divided into dozens of nations and cultures, lacking a consensus name for their species. Thus the crew of the E.C.S. Silk Road—the Earth freighter that had first contacted them five years earlier—had referred to them simply as saurians, a description which had undergone memetic mutation into a demonym, leading in turn to the back-formation “Sauria” as an informal name for the planet itself. Still, Soval would prefer to be able to address them by one of their own names for themselves. Normally first contacts waited until a species was unified enough to have a single consensus language. But while Jonathan Archer may have learned the wisdom of limiting contact with pre-warp cultures through his long association with Soval’s former aide T’Pol, other humans were still quite reckless when it came to contact protocols. Shumar seemed to be no exception.
“Nonetheless, Captain,” Soval told him, “I urge you again to approach this interaction with extreme caution. Our priority should be to ameliorate whatever cultural contamination the Silk Road’s contact may have caused.”
Shumar’s mustachioed lip twisted as though he had tasted something sour. “Why do you Vulcans always assume that any contact from outside is ‘contamination’? No culture develops entirely in isolation, and an influx of new ideas can be enriching.”
“Or disruptive to their fundamental cultural underpinnings. Especially if those ideas are imposed by activist outsiders with superior technology and resources. Given your own heritage, you should be familiar with that principle from both sides.”
“Perhaps in some cases, but here? A civilization thousands of years older than Earth’s, with advanced theoretical sciences?” Shumar had a point. The only reason the Saurians lacked the technological advancement of Vulcan or Earth was that they were so naturally robust and adaptable that they had less need for technology in order to master their environment. But that had not limited their intellectual development. “Discovering extra-Saurian life only confirmed the theories they’d already formed about the universe. They even had relativity and something resembling the basic warp equation, though they hadn’t bothered to develop it.”
“And what if that hadn’t been the case?” Soval had had this discussion with Shumar before, but humans had a proclivity for reiterating arguments in the belief that simple repetition would overcome resistance. Soval indulged the tendency in this case, as it was the first time they had conducted the debate in the hearing of the full command crew. “Or what if there are unknown cultural taboos we simply haven’t discovered yet? There are solid, logical reasons for the Vulcans’ contact policies, and it would be in the Federation’s best interests to adopt them.”
“The Federation doesn’t have that luxury, Commissioner.” The speaker was Commander Caroline Paris, who moved forward into his field of view. Shumar’s first officer was a tall, robust woman of pale complexion and hair similar in hue to the
sands of Vulcan, worn in a tightly knotted style that Soval believed was called a French braid. She had also made this point to him on two prior occasions. “Particularly not deep-space traders like the boomers,” she went on, using the Earth nickname for the generations of humans who had been born and raised aboard low-warp cargo freighters. “Crews like that depend on first contacts with the species they encounter for food, fuel, repair supplies, medicines—things they don’t have the luxury of waiting to find a warp-capable civilization to trade for.”
“I’m well aware of the argument, Commander,” Soval replied. Indeed, the interstellar traders of Earth, Tellar, and Alpha Centauri formed a significant economic bloc whose political pressure had stymied the Vulcan government’s efforts to persuade the Federation to institute Vulcan contact directives. “But surely those with access to faster drives—Starfleet in particular, whose crews are trained to sacrifice themselves for the protection of others—should employ a less self-centered calculation.”
“Starfleet’s duty is to protect the Federation,” Paris countered. “And the Federation’s in the same boat as those traders right now. We’re still rebuilding from the war, and we need a lot of resources.” She nodded at the planet on the viewer. “And Sauria is drowning in resources. Dilithium, tritanium, rare earths, transuranics, whole rain forests of untapped pharmaceutical potential.”
“Not to mention their art, their literature, their music,” Shumar went on avidly. “Our souls could use nourishment too.”
“And one hell of a brandy, according to the Silk Road’s captain,” put in Steven Mullen, Essex’s science officer.
“Since the spirit was surely not distilled from Earth grapes,” Soval said to the lieutenant commander, “I believe the correct term would be eau de vie, would it not?”
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