The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [160]
Still hand in hand with his wife, Charles turned away from the open case so that he faced Archer and T’Pol. “Thank you,” he said, after he’d finally found his voice. “I think we’re ready to find our seats now.”
Let’s hope the future Archer invited us to witness is worth it, he thought.
And then the tears spilled over the brink, and kept coming in torrents.
Mom and Dad must have arrived by now, Trip thought, standing in a small vestibule adjacent to the auditorium’s broad corridors and seats. Dressed again in a simple, dark Vulcan traveler’s robe, he felt reasonably unobtrusive as he swept his gaze across the crowds that were quickly accumulating everywhere in the old stadium, from the field-level seats to the bleachers, and all the way up to the skyboxes. Anyone who saw him would assume he was just another of the hundreds of Vulcans currently living on Earth, or perhaps one of the hundreds more that had arrived just this week specifically to observe today’s formal signing of the Coalition Compact, and the forging of galactic history.
Trip had to admit to himself that he was half-hoping to see his parents, or perhaps his brother Bert, somewhere in the crowd. He felt certain that Captain Archer would have moved entire worlds to make certain that everyone in his family was given seats in one of the auditorium’s best VIP boxes. And while he ached to see his folks and his brother again, and wanted nothing more than to reassure them, part of him was glad that he hadn’t encountered them, and actually hoped that he wouldn’t; he simply didn’t trust himself not to reveal his presence to them, and with the Romulan threat still gathering on the horizon, he knew he didn’t dare risk doing anything that might compromise his usefulness on that front.
Although his parents’ faces, thankfully, didn’t pop out of the crowd as he scanned it, he did unexpectedly recognize a different pair of faces. Though they wore civilian clothes rather than the MACO uniforms that had become so ubiquitous aboard Enterprise during the darkest days of the Xindi crisis, Trip immediately recognized the luxuriant long black hair of Corporal Selma Guitierrez and the strong cleft chin of Sergeant Nelson Kemper. Guitierrez wore a denim baby-carrier that contained an infant, blissfully sleeping despite the noise and tumult of the still-settling crowd.
That must be their little girl, Trip thought, working hard to suppress an extremely un-Vulcan smile as the young couple and their child walked directly past him without taking any apparent notice, evidently on their way to their seats. Trip recalled that Guitierrez’s pregnancy, which had occurred during Enterprise’s Xindi hunt in ‘53, had been the reason both she and Kemper had subsequently left the service. Their little girl- he wasn’t certain, but he thought he recalled hearing that they’d named her either Ellen or Elena- had to be close to a year old by now.
Although the Kemper family quickly passed out of his view and into the milling crowd, the child had remained in Trip’s sight long enough to churn up the painful memory of standing with T’Pol in the parched, red Vulcan desert to bury little Elizabeth. At that instant, all the tragic might-have-beens he’d either faced or turned his back on throughout his life returned to him at once, threatening to bury him in an emotional rockslide. Not wanting to allow anyone to see a weeping Vulcan, he stuffed his rising agony back down as best he could.
He started walking toward one of the STAFF ONLY entrances, grateful that the skill set of a competent spy overlapped considerably with that of a decorated Starfleet chief engineer. His path took him directly past one of the VIP skybox seating areas, where he saw some other familiar faces, the sight of which filled him with still more wistful thoughts. T’Pol wasn’t among them, making him both glad and disappointed. But there was