by Andy Mangels
He began leading the “pirates” down the corridor, trading barbed words with them as they went, all of it concerning the specific whereabouts of their quarry, and the Orion slavers who had supposedly paid these men to bring Shran and Theras to face “justice” for the deaths of some of those who had participated in the recent raid against the Aenar city. Trip felt as though they were being almost tooarch with these exchanges, but hoped that upon a close investigation of Enterprise’s security logs, no one else would notice just how dunderheaded this entire piracy scenario really was.
“Take me to Shran now,or I’ll send one of my men back to kill your captain,” the lead alien said, making a show of his mounting impatience.
Trip affected a nearly panicked tone, but wasn’t completely sure he was only acting. “Okay, okay! I’ve got a better idea. I’ll bring Shran and Theras to us. We won’t have to go any farther.”
“Be very careful,” snarled the pistol-wielding alien.
They went on a short distance until they reached a narrow hatchway, which he and Malcolm had already rigged for precisely this sort of situation.
“You can all come see for yourselves,” he said to the men behind him as he pulled the hatch open and began to climb inside a crawlspace filled with a profusion of cables and conduits. “This is just a com station.”
He reached up and began moving a small handle mounted at the top of the cramped chamber. “I’m gonna need to open this so I can bypass the security protocols,” he continued. “Is that okay?”
The “pirate” leader approached closely and inspected the equipment. His weapon remained raised and ready. “As long as you keep your hands where we can see them.”
“No problem,” Trip said as he continued working. The handle turned, opening up an overhead access panel containing still more cabling and circuitry. After carefully bypassing the security protocols, he grasped one end of an open energy conduit inside the panel and pulled it down.
Holding the open conduit out in front of him, he said, “Now, all I need to do is connect this to the relay inside that panel.” He gestured toward a second overhead panel, located not far from the first one.
“Stop,” the head raider said. To one of his men, he said, “Open it for him.” He pointed at the second panel. “If there’s a weapon in there,” he warned Trip, “you’re going to die before your captain does.”
Still holding the conduit, Trip watched as one of the rifle carriers reached up and opened the second panel. No obvious weapons were in evidence.
“Satisfied?” Trip said.
The head alien sniffed. “Proceed.”
Trip reached up into the second open panel and extracted another open conduit line, the virtual twin of the one he still held in his other hand. Then he joined the ends of the cables, twisting them together, and flipped the toggle switch next to his right hand.
At his signal, the aliens all backed away slightly, getting safely out of harm’s way. Trip jumped down and out of the access hatchway, counting the few seconds that remained.
Gotta have some famous last words,he thought. “There’s just one other thing I need to tell you,” he said, making certain that he spoke loudly and clearly, so that the ship’s computer would pick up every word. “You can all go straight to hell.”
Trip felt his skin itch, experienced a bizarre, disjointed feeling, and then he was pulled away. In that nanosecond when he was still corporeal, he hoped that the small plasma explosion he’d set up would go off without a hitch—and without blowing a huge hole in the hull on the starboard side of E deck.
As a slightly disoriented Trip lay on one of sickbay’s biobeds, Phlox quickly applied convincing facsimiles of all the appropriate wounds to the engineer’s face and chest. Only minutes remained now before Archer was due to call and raise the medical alert, and before the med techs arrived. Phlox had let them go off shift early, but since they all bunked on E deck—the same deck where sickbay was located—they would doubtless arrive quickly once called.
“You will need to breathe as though you’re having an extremely difficult time doing so,” Phlox said to Trip, who looked quite gory at the moment. Even though he knew it was his own harmless handiwork, the sight of the apparently mortally wounded man—his friend—made the Denobulan physician shudder inwardly.
“I faked being sick at school a whole bunch of times, Doc,” Trip said, smiling wanly up at Phlox.
“Yes, well, but this is considerably different,” Phlox said, grimacing. He thought the whole plan was outlandish, and felt certain that it would never hold up to close scrutiny. But as long as it was under way, he was determined to do his best; Commander Tucker’s scheme wasn’t going to fall apart because of hisactions.
Archer stood by the doorway, rubbing the side of his head and wincing. He’d apparently actually been injured, however slightly, during the subterfuge, but there was no time to treat him now. Suddenly, the captain’s communicator beeped. “We’re out of time, Doctor.”
The captain flipped the communicator’s grid open. “We need help in sickbay,” he said, his voice now sounding strained. “Trip’s been hurt.”
“Alerting sickbay personnel now,”T’Pol said, her voice issuing from the device. “What has happened?”Phlox could hear the concern in her tone as he moved to a nearby com panel to enter the command that would summon his emergency med tech staff.
“The intruders were trying to get to Shran and Theras,” Archer said to T’Pol. “Trip tried to stop them. He got caught in some kind of plasma explosion.”
Two of Phlox’s medical technicians—Garver and Stepanczyk—rushed into the chamber, even as T’Pol’s voice issued from the communicator. “The intruders are no longer aboardEnterprise . Their ship is pulling away.”
“What about Shran and Theras?” Archer asked, although he already knew the answer. After all, the reason the “pirates” had come aboard had absolutely nothing to do with Enterprise’s two guests from Andoria.
“Still aboard, Captain. Commander Tucker’s gambit appears to have succeeded in discouraging them.”Had her voiced quavered ever so slightly when she’d said Trip’s name?
“Pursue them, but do notengage,” Archer shouted. “Archer out.”
Phlox began barking orders to his med techs, even as Trip put on an award-winning performance for their benefit. He really did seem to be in great pain, as well as unable to breathe properly.
“The plasma was superheated,” Phlox said to Archer, counterfeiting a sense of rapidly rising alarm. “It thermalized his lungs.” He turned urgently to one of the techs. “Initialize the hyperbaric chamber.”
Archer approached the side of Trip’s biobed. Between gasps, the engineer said, “Sorry about the rifle butt…” He trailed off, his breath apparently beginning to fail him.
“I know, Trip,” Archer said. “Just take it easy. Everything’s all right.”
Trip suddenly began to wheeze violently, as though he could no longer breathe at all.
“We need to get him into the chamber! Now!” Phlox shouted. With Archer’s help, the Denobulan and his med techs moved Trip onto a gurney, and then slid the gurney toward the open and waiting cylinder of the hyperbaric chamber.
As they slid Trip inside, Phlox saw the engineer offer a weak smile—and perhaps an almost imperceptible wink—to Archer.
I hope the techs didn’t see that,Phlox thought as he pressed the button that closed the door and sealed off the airtight chamber from the rest of sickbay. He turned and regarded Captain Archer, who hadn’t returned Trip’s smile.
They both knew that in faking his death, Trip had changed whatever remained of his life forever.
And theirs as well.
Although he was reeling from the news, Travis Mayweather knew he still had a job to do, and he did his best to focus on it. Ten minutes ago, they had lost the trail of the pirate vessel when it entered a dense cloud of asteroids, planetesimals, and assorted other space debris that orbited an uncharted, unremarkable F-type star. Ent
erprise’s polarized hull plating was holding up under the barrage, but the ship was taking a battering.
“I still can find no trace of the intruders’ vessel, Captain,” T’Pol said, sounding grimmer than at any other time he could remember.
Mayweather couldn’t even imagine what she must be feeling right now, after absorbing the terrible news of Commander Tucker’s sudden death. Feeling? Is she evenallowing herself to experience her emotions right now? Or is she just using her Vulcan training to lock them away?
“Keep searching,” Archer said from his command chair, his tone and manner grave as well.
The ship pitched to one side as something large and solid collided with the polarized hull plates. “Sorry, Captain,” Mayweather said, not turning from his post. “We’re flying almost blind here.”
Almost as if on cue, the forward viewscreen lit up brightly, illuminating the interstellar flotsam and jetsam that surrounded them. Mayweather knew what it was even before T’Pol verbalized it for the entire bridge. He had seen enough accidents in space while growing up on space freighters to recognize a catastrophic collision.
“I’m showing a warp-core explosion approximately four hundred thousand kilometers ahead,” T’Pol said. “The energy pattern is consistent with the warp signature of the intruder’s vessel.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Mayweather saw that Archer had stood up from his chair and approached the helm controls.
“Take us in slowly, Travis,” he said quietly. “That hadto be them. They probably shut down their engines while they were hiding from us, then got creamed by an asteroid. Let’s confirm the wreckage.”
“Yes, sir,” Mayweather said. He half hoped to find escape pods somewhere in the region surrounding the late pirate vessel’s mostly vaporized remains.
The possibility that Commander Tucker’s killers might have died an easy death didn’t sit well with him at all.
Thirteen
The early twenty-fifth century
Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana
JAKE STIFLED A YAWN behind one hand.
“You’re bored?” Nog asked, surprise in his voice.
Jake turned to his old friend and grinned. “Not at all, just tired. Between the sound of the rain, the warmth of the fire, the wine, and my age, I’m fighting the sandman.”
Nog tilted his head to one side. “Is that another hewmon cultural idiom, or some other reference I shouldunderstand but don’t?”
Jake smiled again. “It’s from an old Earth myth. The sandman was the king of dreams. He’s the reason when you wake up you have little bits of grit in the corners of your eyes.”
Nog’s expression was one of simultaneous enlightenment and befuddlement. “Ah, I remember now. And he also brings women the men of their dreams. Like in that song I heard some of the female singers perform back at Vic’s. But I don’t ever have ‘grit’ in my eyes when I wake up.”
“Humans often do,” Jake said. The mention of Vic made Jake nostalgic for the old days. Some years back, Quark had given him a copy of Vic’s holodeck program; he had only played it a dozen times or so since, usually when he wanted to get into an old-timey mood for his writing. Vic didn’t seem to care that he wasn’t activated often, or at least if he did, he didn’t chide Jake about it too much. Still, it would be nice to visit Vic’s again, Jake thought.
“So, what do you think now?” Nog asked, gesturing toward the two small holo-imagers whose two extremely divergent narratives about Commander Tucker they’d been watching.
“It’s very strange,” Jake said. “Parts of the story are familiar, but just interpreted differently, and placed five years earlier. It’s like the story behind the story.”
“Don’t they say that history is written by the conqueror?” Nog asked.
“The victor. Though either word works about as well as the other.” Jake ran his hand over the short, gray hair at the back of his head. “What’s so strange about this is that Charles Tucker was one of the better-known martyrs of the proto-Federation, and yet the commonly accepted details of his death are nothing terribly heroic. If anything, the standard ‘bad guys invade the ship’ scenario makes both him and Captain Archer look sort of unprepared, and makes Enterprisesecurity seem so lax as to be laughable.”
“Maybe we’re going to find out that Tucker’s role in early Federation history was more pivotal than we knew,” Nog said.
Jake nodded sagely and reached for his now nearly empty wineglass. “The other thing that’s really unusual about the revised version is the way Section 31 is depicted. It’s smaller than we know it actually became, but the bureau seems to have an almost noble agenda…or at least as much nobility as a spy organization can have.”
“Maybe the morality of it is colored by what happened to Earth in the Xindi attack of 2153,” Nog offered. “Not to mention Terra Prime. And it’s not like I supported Thirty-One at the end, but we know that every government in the galaxy has its own spy network. It’s not like this was the only one, for poverty’s sake.”
Jake laughed. Another thought suddenly occurred to him. “What about the parts of the original history that centered on Rigel X, with Shran’s daughter being rescued from her kidnappers, and the theft of the Tenebian amethyst, and so on? Is all of that a complete fabrication?”
“Well, given that Shran didn’t have a daughter at this point, I’d say that’s probably a ‘yes,”’ Nog said. “But it might also be some sort of amalgamation of other events. After all, for years we’ve been watching some holodeck programmer’s version of these people’s lives, based on records and logs; things we now know have been tampered with.” He paused and grinned at Jake. “Maybe something interesting happens in the Rigel system in thisversion as well.”
Jake regarded his friend with a suspicious eye. “Just how far ahead didyou watch this?”
Nog grinned and leaned forward, his nimble fingers moving toward the holo-imager controls he’d left sitting on Jake’s ancient wooden desk. “Not much further. So, let’s see what happens next.”
Fourteen
Friday, February 14, 2155
EnterpriseNX-01
WHEN CHARLES ANTHONY TUCKER III was a teenager, he and his friends had dared each other repeatedly to open a hatch door on a grain silo, but Trip had actually been the one who had taken the challenge. He hadn’t been paying close enough attention in science class to judge the pressure such materials in a container of that size might be under, and was thus half buried by the flood of grain that spilled out before he could even retreat three steps. If his brother Bert and their friend Bill Hunt hadn’t been quick to pull him out, he might well have been entombed on that long-ago day.
Since that time, Trip had been in more than a few tight spots, but none of those had been quite as suffocating as the grain incident.
Until now.
After the pallet on which he lay finished retracting into the hyperbaric chamber, the oval-shaped, airtight door near his feet closed. Its motion was silent, yet forceful enough to make his ears pop. He resumed his normal respiration then, relieved to relinquish the burden of showmanship to Phlox and the captain. Other than his own breathing and the gentle whispering susurration of the chamber’s independent ventilation system, he was blanketed in utter silence. Then the cylindrical hyperbaric chamber began to thrum around him, just as the light panels built into its walls began throwing off just enough illumination to call attention to the chamber’s disquieting smallness.
Trip fought down incipient claustrophobia by closing his eyes and by trying to regulate his breathing. Beyond the chamber’s confines, he could hear muffled voices, though he couldn’t quite make out the words.
A com speaker near his head—which allowed sickbay personnel to communicate with patients inside the otherwise sound-opaque hyperbaric chamber—suddenly came to life. Now he could hear what was going on beyond the confines of the hyperbaric chamber, in sickbay, where Phlox and his medical technicians were frantically continuing to respond to a preprogramme
d sequence of ever-declining vital signs.
My vital signs,Trip thought, swallowing hard. He opened his eyes again, though he studiously tried to avoid staring at his own ghastly reflection.
Of all the personnel now present in sickbay, only Phlox’s assistants would not have known that those life readings were utterly counterfeit, mere electronic simulations designed to allow Charles Tucker to die, officially and on the record.
“What’s happening in there, Phlox?”the captain said through the chamber’s speaker, still playing his part to the hilt.
“He may have inhaled too much of the plasma during the explosion,”came the Denobulan’s precise, professional response, his voice laced with concern and a convincing tinge of fear. “His lungs are failing.”
“Vital signs crashing, Doctor,”said Crewman Stepanczyk, one of the medical technicians.
Archer: “Do something!”
“I’m afraid, Captain, that there is very little that wecan do,”Phlox said. “We’re losing him.”
Trip listened quietly to the sounds of his own death. A chill slowly navigated the length of his spine, reminding him of how his mother described that very sensation: “Somebody just walked across your grave.”
And now here he was, entombed in a space not much larger than a casket. For better or worse, a chain of events had led him ineluctably into this tiny tube, pretending to be dead, while three of his friends lied to all his other friends and family for him. He thought of how T’Pol would react, especially after the loss of their daughter and their emotionally wrenching journey to Vulcan. And his family, barely over their grieving after the loss of his sister Lizzie, now forced to mourn another death. He hoped that Albert, the final “living” Tucker sibling, would take care of their parents better than he, Trip, had after Lizzie had been killed by the Xindi.
He closed his eyes again, and in the resulting darkness he saw a slow parade of faces.
His mother, Elaine. His father, Charles. His brother, Albert.
