“Well, as you know, all living things—well, most living things, especially humanoids—emit an electromagnetic charge. Subtle, very subtle ... almost undetectable. But I’ve been thinking about some of the readings that I found on the Oanis, and there was a slight disturbance in their electrolytes. That could be caused by a number of things, but it would definitely affect their electrical system, if you will.”
“Electrical system,” Trip repeated. This was news to him; he hadn’t gone beyond first year zoology in college, and had managed to avoid anatomy altogether because of his engineering major. Phlox’s claim sounded pretty ridiculous.
“For example, the heartbeat,” Phlox said. “Its rhythm is regulated by chemicals in the body that produce an electrical effect. In past centuries, humans actually used electricity to restore a heartbeat, or to correct an arrhythmic pulse.”
“Really?” Reed was fascinated. “But certainly humans don’t emit much electricity—”
“Hardly at all,” Phlox said. “It’s very faint; our medical scanners would have to be recalibrated to the utmost sensitivity in order to detect it. But [174] it is there. And since Wanderer, according to what I’ve overheard from your and Commander Tucker’s discussion, is partially composed of electromagnetic pulses, I couldn’t help wondering whether there was a connection.”
“So Wanderer feeds off the electromagnetic field generated by humanoid bodies ...” Trip mused, thinking.
“It’s just a possibility,” Phlox said. “I could be completely wrong.”
Trip didn’t answer him; instead, he reached out for the scanner in Reed’s hands. “Let me see that a minute.” He fiddled with the controls, head down, then checked a reading. “Okay. I’m picking up a very faint electromagnetic field.”
“It could be us,” Reed offered. “Or all these people standing around.”
“Hold on,” Trip said. He shouldered his way past a few people until he stood directly next to the engines.
The reading rose very slightly. Trip’s mood began to lighten.
“Anything?” Reed’s tone was eager.
“Maybe,” Trip said, his intonation rising on the last syllable. “Let’s try a little experiment.” He elbowed his way through the crowd until he found the doors to engineering; drawing in an anticipatory breath, he stepped through them.
On the other side of the doors, officers, seated on the deck, leaning against the bulkheads, lined [175] the corridor. They looked up eagerly as Trip moved past.
“Time to swap?” one of them asked.
“Nope,” Trip murmured, his gaze fixed on the readout. “Just a little experiment.” And as the electromagnetic levels began to fall significantly the further he moved from engineering, the wider his smile became.
He wheeled about on one heel and went back, still grinning, into engineering.
Phlox and Reed were waiting for him, their expressions expectant, hopeful.
“We may just be on to something here,” Trip said.
Captain.
Captain Archer, can you hear me?
Archer woke facedown, one cheek pressed to the unyielding, cold metal deck. His entire body, including his head, ached tremendously as though it had been slammed against the bulkhead repeatedly—at which point, he remembered his encounter with Wanderer and realized that he might very well have been slammed against a bulkhead.
He tried to roll to one side ... and yelled aloud at the searing agony in his left shoulder, which felt as though it had been pulled from its socket.
“Captain.” T’Pol’s ever-steady, soothing tone penetrated Archer’s pain and disorientation. He [176] lay motionless on his side, unwilling to move lest it aggravate his shoulder, and gazed sidewise up at the Vulcan, who crouched over him, her expression reassuringly neutral. “Allow me to assist you in rising. Your shoulder appears to be dislocated.”
“Fine,” Archer gasped. “I’m not going anywhere without help.” He held perfectly still as the Vulcan leaned over him—so close that he felt the more-than-human warmth emanating from her body, and smelled a subtle fragrance similar to evergreen and citrus. Slender but surprisingly strong arms slipped around his body, enveloping him, and lifted him, swiftly but cautiously, to his feet. Even so, there was pain; Archer gritted his teeth, and let go a small yelp as he finally found his balance and stood on his own.
T’Pol stepped back and observed him critically, staring intently into his eyes. “Sir, I believe you may have a subdural hematoma.”
“A what?” Archer asked groggily.
“I believe the vernacular is ‘a concussion.’ ”
“I can believe it.” Archer looked down at himself and took a quick assessment. The skin on his palms felt burned, even blistered, and a quick glance showed that the skin there was in fact reddened. ... Even his face, arms, and back tingled, as if they, too, had been burned.
“I had a little encounter with Wanderer.” He ran a hand cautiously over his hair; it felt as [177] though it’d been standing on end, from static electricity. “I actually touched it—and I feel as though I’ve been struck by lightning.”
“Wanderer has not left, sir. In fact, it was guarding you when I came off the turbolift ... and from all indications, it does not intend to allow us access to it.”
Archer followed her gaze: sure enough, blocking the way to the turbolift, Wanderer still hovered. But something about the creature had changed: it had deepened in color, becoming an intense sapphire, and its energy patterns were moving more swiftly than ever before; its shape was decidedly irregular.
“You didn’t like that any more than I did, did you?” Archer asked it. The fact made little sense; Archer had half expected it to kill him—with the hope that it would win the ensign his life.
“It has changed in appearance,” T’Pol confirmed.
Behind him, the unconscious ensign still lay where the captain had placed him. Holding his one useless arm to his side, Archer moved slowly toward the younger man; T’Pol hurried toward the ensign, crouched down, and felt his neck for a pulse. “Pulse is slow,” she reported, “but steady.”
Archer let go a grateful sigh, then looked up at their nemesis.
T’Pol seemed to read his thoughts. Rising, she said, “It will do no good to rush the creature [178] again, sir—you will only injure yourself further. Perhaps I can reason with it.”
“Be my guest,” Archer said, without hiding his skepticism.
T’Pol approached the creature and said aloud, “Wanderer. Please move aside so that the captain and I can take the injured ensign to engineering.”
The entity’s brightness faded a bit; after a pause, T’Pol turned to the captain. “It refuses, sir. It says that it has a right to protect its own survival.”
“To feed off us, you mean.” Archer’s lips twisted. “It’s getting worried about lunch now that everyone’s been moved to engineering.”
T’Pol hesitated. “I don’t believe it would intentionally harm me, Captain. I would like to try heading for the turbolift carrying the two of you—”
Wanderer obviously “said” something to her, for she broke off and turned toward the creature as if listening. After a pause, she told Archer dryly: “Apparently, Wanderer would not intentionally harm me—but it would not stop me from harming myself, and the two of you humans, if I chose to touch it. It warns that it will not move and allow us access to the turbolift.”
“Well, if it won’t move, then we’ll just have to find a way around it. If we can’t go up the turbo-lift, maybe we can try another way. ...”
T’Pol nodded. She bent down and lifted the [179] ensign in her arms, then followed the captain down the corridor toward the nearest access tunnel—but Wanderer moved into position in front of them, once again stopping them in their tracks.
“All right,” Archer said. “Maybe we can’t go up to engineering. But who’s to say we can’t go down?” He began to move in the opposite direction down the corridor, wincing with each step at the fresh knifelike pain in
his arm and shoulder. He was headed for an access tunnel that led only one way: down to F-deck, which housed the torpedo bays and the armory.
T’Pol frowned. “What is your rationale for doing so?”
Archer knew the answer would draw resistance from his second-in-command, something he was in no mood for. Evasively, he replied, “Just consider it an order, Sub-Commander.”
She said nothing further, merely followed him to the tunnel opening. She went first, easily slinging the unconscious ensign over one shoulder, then climbing down without effort.
For Archer, it was enormously awkward and precarious. He was forced to climb down one-handed—making him feel like he was a cadet undergoing obstacle training. At each rung, he had to let go and quickly grab for the next, leaving an instant where he was completely unstable. The disabled arm swung uselessly at his side; the stabs of pain emanated from the center of [180] Archer’s spine through his shoulder and all the way down to his fingertips, causing him to gasp through gritted teeth.
Somehow, he made it down into the armory, where T’Pol waited, not even breathing heavily. Archer at once moved to the bulkhead where the phase rifles were stored and took one with his good hand.
T’Pol stood, silent and solemn.
“Don’t worry, I’m not asking you to arm yourself,” Archer said. He checked the setting on the rifle awkwardly, then hoisted the weapon to see if he could aim. It wasn’t comfortable, but it would work.
“Captain,” T’Pol says earnestly, “Wanderer is unlike any other life-form we have discovered. It may be the only one of its kind. To destroy it would be tantamount to committing the same crime it committed against the Oanis—genocide.”
“Would you prefer it wiped out everyone on this ship, and on Earth, instead?”
“No. However, I am certain a third solution exists.”
“Look, I don’t want to kill it any more than you do. I doubt a blast from a phase rifle will do anything to it—I’m just hoping it’ll disable the damned thing. But if it does kill it—well, I’m willing to take that chance.” He moved from the armory toward the turbolift as T’Pol followed, the ensign still in her arms.
[181] As he expected, Wanderer was waiting for them in front of the F-deck turbolift.
The sight of the creature evoked in Archer quite the opposite of compassion. He steadied the rifle against the right side of his body. “All right, Wanderer—you don’t like the taste of me right now. How do you like the taste of this?”
He fired.
The brilliant beam bored through the air ... and, as Archer had feared, directly through the energy creature, piercing the field of blue-green without effect, just as it would any spaceborne field of radiation or electromagnetic pulses.
The blast sailed through Wanderer so effortlessly, in fact, that it damaged the bulkhead behind the creature, searing through the metal and exposing the circuitry beneath.
Sparks flew. And a single electrical current—a blue-white surge of microlightning—crackled.
The current caught Wanderer’s nebulous periphery. The creature writhed, pulsing forward suddenly in one direction like a reckless amoeba and turning an intense shade of cobalt so dazzling that Archer shielded his eyes from the glow.
“Captain,” T’Pol said, “I believe we can attempt to board the turbolift.”
The two of them hurried through the open doors while a distracted Wanderer continued to spasm and pulsate.
* * *
[182] “Commander!” Hoshi shouted, over the din of an overcrowded engineering. “I’ve got an open channel!”
Trip Tucker looked up from the device he and Malcolm Reed had been working on. It was ridiculously simple, actually, so simple and old-fashioned that they’d had trouble finding parts for it—just a small electricity generator.
Hoshi’s words gave Trip hope; he’d started to worry about the captain—and now, T’Pol. They’d been gone too long, and clearly had encountered Wanderer on their way ... But the sudden reclamation of communications made Trip grin. His instincts told him Jonathan Archer was alive and well and giving Wanderer a run for its money.
“Contact Starfleet Command at once,” he ordered cheerfully, rising from where he and Reed had been bent over their old-fashioned device. “Advise them of our situation.”
“You’ve got it, sir.”
The ride to D-deck, a mixture for Archer of agony and optimism, seemed to take longer than usual—an effect, no doubt, of the shooting pain in his shoulder and arm, and his eagerness to be back in the haven of engineering. Beside him, T’Pol stood silently, the ensign—several inches taller than she—cradled in her arms, while her posture remained straight and at ease, as if she were holding no more than an infant.
[183] At last the turbolift stopped, and the doors opened onto D-deck, to Archers relief; he had half expected Wanderer to recover and stall their journey before they reached the main engineering level. But now the engine room was only a corridor’s stroll away. Archer moved swiftly out of the lift, clutching his affected arm to his side, gritting his teeth against the pain; T’Pol matched him stride for stride.
Yet before they made it even a third of the way to their destination, Archer stopped in his tracks at an unexpected sight—one that at first his concussion-fogged brain could not make sense of.
Lieutenant Meir, her blond hair in unkempt curls upon her shoulders, uniform disheveled, had just stepped into their path from an intersecting corridor; at the sight of them, she turned and faced them.
Archer was speechless. At first, he felt overwhelmed with joy: he had been wrong, Meir had been alive all along, simply unconscious, and had recovered. ...
And then a darker realization overtook the joy. There was something deeply unnatural about the human woman’s movements, something marionettelike.
Like any good sub-commander, T’Pol stepped into the breach at the captain’s silence. “Lieutenant,” she ordered. “Report at once to engineering.”
[184] Meir’s eyes were open but sightless, directed at the other two officers, but unfocused. Her hand moved to her utility belt, and the phase pistol strapped there.
With his good hand, Archer seized T’Pol’s shoulder and pushed her and her burden down just before Meir fired. At the same time, he dropped to the deck; the rush of adrenaline managed to make his shoulder’s intolerable pain bearable.
“Meir’s dead,” he breathed to the downed Vulcan beside him. “Hoshi was right—she wasn’t hallucinating. Wanderer has somehow reanimated the lieutenant.”
The bright blast overhead streaked past them and seared open the bulkhead with the pervasive smell of scorched metal.
“The attack is not logical.” T’Pol lay on her stomach, palms pressed to the deck beneath her collarbone; her normally perfect fringe of bangs was parted, and a stray brown wisp of hair stuck out above the rest. She turned her face toward the captain. “Her weapon is set to kill.”
In the instant before Meir took inhumanly clumsy aim again, Archer saw that the Vulcan was right. It made no sense: if Wanderer wanted to keep Archer and the unconscious ensign from engineering so that it could feed off them, why not simply stun them?
Meir fired, jerkily, again, and Archer rolled. In the periphery of his vision, bedazzled by the [185] phase-pistol blast, he saw T’Pol rise, leaving the ensign lying on the deck. The Vulcan charged the human woman, striking her at waist level and knocking her off her feet, onto her back. Her hand struck the metal deck with audible force; the phase pistol went skittering across the corridor.
T’Pol scrambled in the direction of the weapon. But Meir did not stay down long. Her body jerked to its feet as though yanked by an invisible wire attached to her sternum; she headed straight for the Vulcan.
At the same time, Archer struggled to his feet, clasping the injured arm against his side. He, too, made a dash for the weapon.
T’Pol reached it first. She seized the phase pistol and turned—at the same time, smoothly switching the setting from kill to stun.
>
“It doesn’t matter!” Archer shouted. “She’s already dead!”
But his words came too late. In the heartbeat it took T’Pol to turn and switch the weapon’s setting, Meir charged.
T’Pol fired, the blast knocking the human’s body backward.
How do you knock a corpse unconscious? Archer wondered. How do you kill it?
His question was answered immediately as Meir rose again, puppetlike, and headed once more for T’Pol. By this time, Archer was upon them both. With his good arm, he swung with all [186] his strength at Meir, hoping at least to knock her off balance and allow T’Pol time to rise. The act of hitting another officer without restraint went against all of Archers instincts, but he managed to strike the lieutenant with enough force to send her a staggering step sideways.
T’Pol leapt to her feet, phaser still in her hand.
“Set it on kill,” Archer commanded.
T’Pol hesitated.
And in that instant of hesitation, Meir struck Archer with a crushing blow to the midback—a blow stronger than any human, male or female, could have administered. He dropped to his knees, by sheer will refusing to go all the way down. “Shoot!” he cried hoarsely.
T’Pol fired.
Once again, the human woman went staggering back ... then immediately returned and seized T’Pol’s wrist. At the same time, Meir slammed the Vulcan’s back against the wall, with such force that phase pistol dropped and T’Pol slid to the deck, dazed.
“No,” Archer said, furious at himself, at his wounds, which left him unable to fight back. Wanderer would kill them now, and have his ship—yet even facing defeat, Archer could not permit himself to yield to it. He forced himself to his feet and drew a ragged breath, intending to hurl himself at Meir’s body one last time. ...
But Meir, apparently satisfied, picked up the [187] pistol and walked away down the corridor, intent on some other destination.
“What the ... ?” Archer murmured, gasping, clutching his arm to his side. He staggered over to T’Pol, who sat, somewhat wide-eyed, against the bulkhead. “Are you okay?”
“I am ... free of any significant injury.” She glanced up at the captain. “Certainly, I am in better condition than you are.”
Star Trek: Enterprise - Surak's Soul Page 13
