Surak's Soul - J.M. Dillard [36]
She shook her head. “He’s deteriorating and I can’t stop it.”
Archer let a long moment of silence pass between the three of them before speaking again. “How long?”
Her eyes narrowed slightly with pain. “A day, if he continues declining at the same rate. With Reed, I don’t know yet.”
Archer gave a single, unhappy nod. “There might be hope. Hoshi just reported that a traveler from another planet visited the Oanis and apparently had a cure, which they refused for philosophical reasons. Wanderer is helping us track down that traveler right now.” He made the situation sound better than it actually was; it was important for Cutler, at least, to have hope if she was to maintain sanity here in sickbay.
“Good,” Cutler said, but the enthusiasm in her tone was muted. “Any idea how long that’ll take?”
“I’ll check on it and get back to you,” Archer promised. “Trip, we need to take a little stop by engineering. I need you to coax everything you can from those engines.”
The captain made good on his promise; Wanderer predicted that the planet Shikeda was reachable within twenty hours, so long as Enterprise was not forced to slow her speed. The creature was now happily settled in front of the computers in the lab near sickbay. Once Cutler was informed and warp four-point-five reached, Archer dragged Trip Tucker with him to his quarters and sat him down, once again with a glass of bourbon.
Tucker sighed. “Isn’t this where our evening started?”
“Not quite,” Archer said darkly, legs stretched out in front of him on the bed. On the deck between him and Trip, Porthos paced nervously and whined.
“I know, boy,” Archer said. “You just wish I would settle down and get to sleep, so you’d know everything was back to normal. But it isn’t. Come on.” He patted the space between his legs; Porthos immediately jumped up and curled himself into a canine crescent, chin on Archer’s thigh, worried gaze on his master’s face.
“I just feel like such a damned heel,” Trip said finally, the first normal Trip-sounding noise he’d made since they were in sickbay.
“Why should you feel like a heel? Cutler said you caught Malcolm before he hit the deck.”
“Yeah, but he tried…” Trip broke off, his voice suspiciously wavering; he coughed, then threw back his head and took a stiff belt of bourbon. Then he sighed deeply, and the resulting alcohol breeze made Archer wince ever so slightly. “Aw, heck, he tried to tell me he was changing his will and leaving everything to me. Then he fainted in sickbay, and I made fun of him….”
Archer decided that the best way to diffuse the tension was to add a little hard-boiled levity. “Yeah? And did you ask him what would happen to the family jewels when you croaked?”
It worked; Tucker’s lips curved in a faint ghost of a grin. “Depraved minds think alike. That’s exactly what I pointed out to him, Captain. But he was damned determined.” He let go a huff of air, half out of humor, half out of pain. “For a Starfleet stiff, he’s pretty well off. Seems he’s got some property in the Cayman Islands, a huge spread in Argentina, a place in a hoity-toity London neighborhood…”
“All you have to do is survive, Commander,” Archer told him. “Who knows? Behave yourself, and I might leave that little condo on Kauai to you.…You could come out of this one ahead. And of course, there’s Porthos, here.” He stroked the dog’s smooth, warm head.
“Keep the condo,” Tucker said. “I’ll fight with Hoshi over the dog. I could use a little companionship.”
“That’s what the condo on Kauai’s for,” Archer said, and they both shared a feeble laugh. It faded quickly; Archer reached for the shelf beside the bed, where he’d left the picture of his father with Zefram Cochrane. He held the picture in one palm and gazed at it.
“Who’s that?” Trip asked.
“My dad.” Archer stared at the image a moment before he spoke. It occurred to him with resounding simplicity that, despite the occasional loneliness of the life he’d chosen, he was irrevocably happy—glad every morning when he woke to realize where he was and what he was doing; grateful every night for the same when