by Diane Carey
Tucker didn’t say anything. What did that mean?
T’Pol raised her chin a little and announced. “As your highest ranking officer, I assumed command while you were incapacitated.”
Archer’s stomach sank. “Are we underway?”
Tucker nodded.
To T’Pol, Archer coldly accused, “You didn’t waste much time, did you?”
She didn’t respond, but turned to Phlox. “Is he fit to resume command?”
“As long as he returns for more eel therapy tomorrow.”
Archer ignored her and looked at Tucker. “How long till we get back to Earth?”
“Earth, sir?”
Was that a hint of a smile?
T’Pol turned back to them. “We’re currently tracking the Suliban vessel that left Rigel shortly after you were injured.”
Skeptical and surprised, Archer asked, “You got their … plasma decay rate?”
“With Mr.Tucker’s assistance, I modified your sensors. We now have the resolution to detect their warp trail.”
“What happened to ‘This is a foolish mission’?”
“It is a foolish mission,” she insisted. “The Suliban are clearly a hostile race with technology far superior to yours. But, as acting captain … I was obligated to anticipate your wishes.”
Well, well, well. Had something changed in Archer’s dreams? “As acting captain,” he echoed, “you could’ve done whatever the hell you wanted to do.”
Her cheeks flushed olive—just enough to notice—but she didn’t offer any explanations or comments on what he had just said to her.
“I should return to the bridge,” was all she said.
“Dismissed.”
Archer had more to say, but he let her go. Whatever had happened, it was hard enough on her to buck the Vulcan trend. Renewed hope surged up. He hadn’t lost the mission yet.
Trip Tucker waited until the door closed, then looked at Archer. With significance, he said, “Modifying the sensors was her idea, sir.”
Archer let his head sink back on the cushion. “Why would she do that? Go against the wishes of whoever designed her position here?”
“It just might be,” Tucker said with a twinkle, “you’re having more effect on her than they are. Whoever they are.”
“Have you and Reed found out anything?”
“She’s clean and normal right up until she gets the scholarship that put her in Soval’s office. Then, her records start getting real terse and kind of vague.”
“Could be just the logging style of that office,” Archer mentioned. “Details never were very important to Soval.”
“Or it could be a masking technique,” Tucker said. “Got to admit, I was knocked over when she decided to pursue.”
“It’s not what a spy would do, is it?”
“No … sir, could it be she’s a spy and even she doesn’t know it?”
“If she doesn’t know it, then I don’t care one way or the other. As long as she knows who she works for here and now.”
Tucker paced around the end of the bed. “She might work for you … except we picked up log echoes of several messages going back and forth between Soval and Admiral Forrest just before she was assigned.”
Archer narrowed his eyes in thought. “I didn’t think Soval and Forrest had that much to say to each other.”
“You think they’re up to something?” Tucker asked. “And she’s the something?”
“Or we’re the something. All of us, together. I know Forrest. He’s not likely to have me watched. If he agreed to a Vulcan plant, there must be a different reason. Completely different.”
“They wouldn’t tell you?”
“I’d be the last person they’d tell. Trip …what do you think of this …maybe the Vulcans really don’t know if they can be around humans and function for decades upon decades. Maybe Soval finally wants to know, once and for all, if we can exist together in hostile space and come out productive.”
“You mean they’re testing us?”
Archer thought about that, then dismissed it. “I doubt it. They know everything there is to know about humanity. All you have to do is look at history. It’s all there. We don’t hide anything, even the worst things. Humans aren’t a mystery. But … Vulcans are still a mystery, even to each other. They don’t step out of that box very often, and they’re about to be kicked right out. It could be they’re testing themselves. And they’re using her to do it.”
“T’Pol’s the guinea pig?” Tucker blurted. “They want to see how she’ll do? I’ll be damned!”
“And it worked,” Archer said. “Her technical expertise and ability to stay cool, side by side with my irrational leaps of anger and whatever else I’ve got … it worked. We came out of our first big test as a human-Vulcan team.”
“I’ll be damned … How can you confirm any of this?”
“I probably can’t. All I can do is keep going forward with nothing to hide. A spy’s no good if you’ve got nothing to hide.”
“How ’bout that … T’Pol’s the lab animal. What do you know!” Tucker slapped the end of the bed with a victorious hand, then recoiled. “Sorry! Did I hurt you?”
Archer leaned back, put his arms behind his head, and luxuriated. “Trip, I don’t think anybody can hurt me anymore today.”
“What are the symptoms of frostbite?”
Hoshi Sato picked at her fingertips. Behind her complaints, the sensor console was making a strange and frantic ping every few seconds.
Lieutenant Reed didn’t offer her a sympathetic glance, but did explain, “Your appendages blister, peel, turn gangrenous.”
“I think I have frostbite.”
Ah, well. He moved closer to her, glad he didn’t have to cros? in front of T’Pol in the command chair. “Let me see … Dr. Phlox may have to amputate.”
Hoshi frowned. “I never had to worry about frostbite in Brazil.”
Before he could respond, the pings became suddenly more frantic and closer together.
“They’re getting too far ahead of us,” Ensign Mayweather said, watching the helm with frustration.
“Match their speed,” T’Pol said flatly.
Mayweather glanced helplessly at Reed, then declared, “I’m not authorized to go beyond four-four.”
T’Pol tapped a button.
“Engineering,” Tucker’s voice answered.
“Mr. Tucker, would you please give the helmsman permission to go to warp four point five.”
“It’s okay, Travis. I’ll keep an eye on the engines.”
Reed watched Mayweather, but couldn’t tell whether the helmsman liked or disliked what he was now doing. The ship surged under them, physically and with great confidence. The pinging slowed down to a normal rhythm and volume. The sensors were much happier.
There was a certain irony in T’Pol’s being the one to give the order to go to four-five. Reed tried not to be affected by such trivialities, but some rites of passage should belong to the captain alone. Yet, without consideration, the Vulcan woman had seized the privilege for herself. And the glory, if any came?
He respected the uniform, as he must, but her presence here was the culmination of a dire prediction by Trip Tucker. Tucker’s instincts had proven correct, or partially. In fact, this woman had bothered to execute the captain’s plans instead of her own.
Still, his investigation had turned up a strange trail of communiqués culminating in her assignment here. The captain had chosen not to question the trail, but to push them all farther down it. Now T’Pol was, perhaps, still being manipulated, but by Jonathan Archer.
Very nice. Reed rocked on his heels. Very nice indeed.
“Archer to bridge.”
Reed relieved Hoshi of the need to use her poor fingers by pushing the intercom himself. “Yes, sir, Reed here.”
“Tucker says we just accomplished four-five. I’d have liked to have been there for that.”
T’Pol glanced at Reed, but let him do the talking.
> “You are here, sir, in all our spirits. We wouldn’t have been here at all if not for you.”
“The farther in the future they are, the more crazy and dangerous it is that they would be doing these things. While it has marginal effects on people here, it could completely change their own time. So what do they want?”
Jonathan Archer took tentative steps as he circumnavigated the table in his office. His leg was tingling from the knee to the hip. Still not good.
“Trip … give me a hand.”
Trip Tucker rushed to him from the couch and eagerly helped him back into the office chair. Beside them, stars streaked by the portal at high warp. Archer felt out of commission, wearing only his T-shirt and nonregtrousers, but he knew he had to give himself another hour to come out of the doctor’s funny sedative. He seemed to have the time. They were in hot pursuit, but only matching the speed of the people they were pursuing. They didn’t, after all, want to catch them—not quite yet. They wanted to be led somewhere first.
Warp four point five …
“It’s possible there’s something about time travel we don’t understand,” Archer suggested.
“I’d say the odds for that are good,” Tucker grumbled as he stuffed a pillow under the captain’s bad leg and bothered to fluff it. He straightened and surveyed his work. “Feel better?”
“Fine, I’m fine, Trip, thanks. Is it somebody more advanced than we are,” Archer contemplated, “trying to change the near past? Or are they in the far distant future? I’d like to ask T’Pol what she thinks. Do I dare?”
“I wouldn’t,” Tucker bluntly announced. “She’s always enjoyed a rigid thought process. Today I think you shook her with your free-roaming methods. Throw time tampering into the mix? I’m scared enough for both her and me.
“Higher level physics break down rationality,” Tucker continued. “Progress at that level comes from intuitive leaps, like Einstein imagining what it was like to ride a beam of light.”
“No Vulcan would do that,” Archer said. “It’s not possible to ride a beam of light.”
Tucker lowered his chin. “It is now.”
Archer smiled. “They think emotionalism, unchecked, will destroy. It’s made them afraid. But look at Hoshi. She’s terrified every time something happens, but she keeps moving. She always moves to the next step, past the point of fear. Humans might go off in forty wrong directions, but the forty-first might take us someplace new.”
Tucker contributed, “Vulcans never want to get off the trail.”
“Well,” he began instead, “you can sit inside and watch through the window while children play in the street, and say how they might get hurt out there. You can be the little old ladies of the galaxy, but you don’t have any fun, and before long nobody talks to you. The Vulcans have wrapped it in a shell of elegance. If I told her that, what do you think she’d say?”
Tucker’s face screwed up as he tried to pretend a Vulcan point of view. “Probably something about men in Earth history like Stalin and Li Quan—they were given the power to get anything they wanted, measured by their idea of ‘fun.’ ”
“Good point. I think we agree it’s dangerous for these beings from the future to help the Suliban, but it’s not so different from an advanced race like the Vulcans coming and helping Earth. If it’s so risky, why are they helping us at all? They didn’t help the Klingons, did they?”
“No, nor anybody else, if I read the subtle side correctly. I’ve never heard a single Vulcan talk about any other race they shepherded.”
Tucker laughed. “I’ll ask her that one myself.”
Archer nodded, agreeing with the sentiment but not the plan. “The idea of time travel itself is, on its face, illogical. Isn’t it?”
“No,” Tucker seized. “She’d have to agree with me on this. The illogical doesn’t exist in science. There is something we don’t yet understand that allows time travel to take place.”
Archer troubled to understand what Tucker had just said, and for a moment forgot about T’Pol. Instead, he found himself remembering Sarin. “If travel backward in time can take place, then causality doesn’t exist. If causality doesn’t exist, where is logic? ‘A’ plus ‘B’ causes ‘C.’ ”
“But causality does take a beating at a level of quantum physics. It seems to break down at certain points. Are we discussing whether or not time travel is possible?” Tucker asked. “Or why anybody would be stupid enough to try it?”
“Both,” Archer said. “First, is it possible, and second, why would anybody do it, because you can go back and destroy yourself very easily. If I go back and stop an Austrian farmer in the mid-800s and ask him directions while he’s on his way to the market, he gets to the market five minutes later, and misses meeting the woman he was supposed to marry. She passes by. Because they never met, Adolf Hitler is never born. World War II never happens, or happens later for other reasons, and the technological rush of the mid-20th century is delayed thirty or forty years … Zephram Cochrane doesn’t have the infrastructure he needs to invent warp drive, and we never meet the Vulcans.”
“Instead of meeting the Vulcans,” Tucker picked up, “we meet the Klingons instead. By now, the Klingons are dominant on Earth and using Earth as a toehold in this whole section of the galaxy.”
“A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa,” Archer murmured, “and there’s a typhoon in China the next spring. This idea that anyone can engineer the future by screwing up the past—”
“John,” Tucker interrupted, “could it be possible they want to screw up their own time? Are they insane, maybe?”
Archer didn’t have the answer, but the question made him think of something else. “Or … are they reacting to something? Are these people from the future being forced to action, the way Vulcans and humans are forced to put weapons on our ships because there are hostile powers out there? Are they being forced to tamper with the past to stop somebody else from tampering?”
“Sure seems insane.”
“I wish I could talk to these people for five minutes … if we have no way of knowing, how can we act?”
“With you laid up, there won’t be any action. T’Pol—she’ll just say since we have no basis on which to act, then you should do nothing.”
“That’s the difference between us,” he reminded. “Since we have no basis, I’ll act on what I do know. They took the Klingon, they have no right, and we’re taking him back.”
Archer bristled at his own conclusion and looked at Tucker for the support he knew would be there. This whole episode had been anything but proactive. Instead of making things happen, they had been involved in a scheme of making things not happen.
He wanted to change that.
“I just have one thing,” Tucker slowly added. “What’s the moral imperative to protect the future?”
“None,” Archer said with a jolt of enthusiasm. “It hasn’t happened yet.”
The ship shuddered under them suddenly, cutting off the conversation.
“Captain …” Tucker made a tentative step toward the door.
“Sure, Trip, go mind your engines. Thanks for helping me work through this. If we know some questions, we’ll have a way to recognize the answers when they come.”
“I love the concrete! Call if you need me.” Embracing that which he could control to some degree, Tucker was gone in a flash.
When he was alone, Archer looked out the window at the streaks of stars they were passing at remarkable new speeds. We’re here, Dad … warp four point five.
He cleared his throat and touched the nearest computer link. “Enterprisestarlog, Captain Jonathan Archer. April sixteenth, 2151 …”
Starlog.
“No, no—delete that. Begin recording … Captain’s log, April sixteenth, 2151. We’ve been tracking the Suliban’s ship for ten hours, thanks to our science officer, who came up with a way to tweak the sensors—computer, pause.”
He let his head drop back and spoke aloud to the nearest sympathetic ear. �
��I save her life … and now she’s helping us with the mission. One good turn deserves another? Doesn’t sound very Vulcan.”
He stopped mumbling, thought about what he had just said, what he and Tucker had talked about before, and about the future—all the different possible versions.
“Resume log.”
The computer bleeped to assure him it was recording.
“I have no reason to believe Klaang is still alive. But, if the Suliban woman was telling the truth, it’s crucial we try to find him. Computer … pause.”
His back was aching in this position. He pulled Tucker’s pillow out from under his leg and sat up. Sitting down just wasn’t getting him in the right frame of mind. With care, he pushed off the chair again and put new pressure on his leg.
He moved across the room to where Porthos lay digesting a fine nonvegetarian meal. He scratched the dog’s nose thoughtfully. “Have you ever known a Vulcan to return a favor? No, neither have I.”
So he and Tucker were right—there was more going on with T’Pol than just guilt about his risking his own life to save hers. Officers, soldiers, shipmates did that for each other all the time. He couldn’t believe selflessness was so new to Vulcans that they had only found it here. They’d been in space a long time, and you can’t do that without a scaffold of cooperation and generosity toward each other, whether you admit it’s there or not.
He scratched the dog and thought about his conversation with Tucker about time tampering. He wished he could discuss it with T’Pol, because he needed a cool head when it came to such long-range theoreticals, but all his internal alarms stopped him.
“Resume log. I still haven’t decided whether to ask Sub-Commander T’Pol about this temporal cold war … my instincts tell me not to trust her—”
He paused. Something had just changed. The vibrations coming up through his injured leg were different from a few seconds ago.
He looked at the window. The stars were changing. The ship was falling out of warp!
“Computer, pause. Archer to T’Pol. Report!”
“If you’re feeling well enough to come to the bridge, Captain,” her voice called with a thread of tension, “now would be a good time.”
