Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [29]
He continued to ponder these questions as he crossed the hangar and approached his ship. It wasn’t until he used his handheld remote unit to open the hatch and lower the gangplank that he began to wonder what had happened to the security guards the spaceport usually posted at the hangar entrances.
Just as he reached the gangplank, a quartet of gray-uniformed figures armed with rifles landed all around him, lowering themselves swiftly on long cables suspended from the hangar’s vaulted ceiling.
Trahve raised his hands in a gesture of surrender as one of the troopers pulled something from Trahve’s back. The transmitter that Archer must have placed there, he realized belatedly.
He smiled appreciatively as they bound his wrists and marched him aboard his own ship. “You people are more accomplished than I gave you credit for.” He doubted whether they had understood his words, since they were holding weapons rather than translation gear.
Seven million people?
Trahve tried to put all such doubts out of his mind. He told himself yet again that everything would work out just fine, so long as everything continued going exactly to plan.
“I want at least one MACO guarding the gangplank,” Archer said, taking care to use his most no-nonsense command voice. With the entire team now aboard La’an Trahve’s captured vessel—which was still standing on its landing legs in the hangar, and thus was extremely vulnerable—there could be no question as to who was in charge of this mission. “Just in case the spaceport security personnel start getting curious about what’s going on aboard this ship.”
Hayes nodded, first to Archer, then to Kemper and Money, both of whom immediately disappeared into the still-open gangway of Trahve’s ship. Corporal Peruzzi remained standing a short distance from Hayes, keeping vigil over the cramped cockpit.
Archer’s feelings of grief and rage were every bit as strong now as they had been back in March. Tamping down his emotions with a ferocity that he suspected T’Pol would applaud, he accepted the padd that Malcolm was holding out to him. Then he walked past Hayes, O’Neill, Chandra, and Peruzzi and took a seat beside Trahve in the alien courier’s own cockpit.
Archer raised the padd so that the manacled Trahve could see its display easily.
“We found this energy pattern in the remains of the weapon the Xindi sent against our planet,” Archer said, holding the padd like an indictment. “My tactical officer just found traces of the same energy signature on your clothing.
“Your courier duties wouldn’t happen to take you anywhere near a facility where the Xindi are building a large-scale particle-beam weapon, would it?”
Trahve merely sighed, slumped in his chair, and stared down at the deck.
Archer thought the man’s guilty-looking silence spoke volumes.
Six
Enterprise NX-01
IF WE FIND THIS, we find the Xindi.
As she looked through the scanner at the elegant, snowflake-like energy pattern, T’Pol suddenly became acutely aware of the preternatural silence that had descended upon the bridge. The quiet wasn’t the result of inadequate staffing—despite the day’s anomaly-related trauma, she had filled all the bridge positions handily—but had been caused instead by a simple lack of noise. None of the crew members present were conversing, and even the regular pings and beeps produced by the ship’s computers, sensors, and various other systems seemed to have paused as though in contemplation.
T’Pol appreciated the stillness, which gave her study of the energy signature an almost meditative quality. But she also knew that eventually this transient moment of serenity would end, and the ongoing press of ship’s business would whisk her back into the unending babble of starship life, in this environment dominated by overly emotional and sometimes too-gregarious humans.
Not fifteen minutes had passed before T’Pol’s prediction came true.
“Sub-Commander T’Pol,” Ensign Felipe Marcel said from the