The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [50]
“I know, Trip,” Archer said. “Just take it easy. Everything’s all right.”
Trip suddenly began to wheeze violently, as though he could no longer breathe at all.
“We need to get him into the chamber! Now!” Phlox shouted. With Archer’s help, the Denobulan and his med techs moved Trip onto a gurney, and then slid the gurney toward the open and waiting cylinder of the hyperbaric chamber.
As they slid Trip inside, Phlox saw the engineer offer a weak smile- and perhaps an almost imperceptible wink- to Archer.
I hope the techs didn’t see that, Phlox thought as he pressed the button that closed the door and sealed off the airtight chamber from the rest of sickbay. He turned and regarded Captain Archer, who hadn’t returned Trip’s smile.
They both knew that in faking his death, Trip had changed whatever remained of his life forever.
And theirs as well.
Although he was reeling from the news, Travis Mayweather knew he still had a job to do, and he did his best to focus on it. Ten minutes ago, they had lost the trail of the pirate vessel when it entered a dense cloud of asteroids, planetesimals, and assorted other space debris that orbited an uncharted, unremarkable F-type star. Enterprise’s polarized hull plating was holding up under the barrage, but the ship was taking a battering.
“I still can find no trace of the intruders’ vessel, Captain,” T’Pol said, sounding grimmer than at any other time he could remember.
Mayweather couldn’t even imagine what she must be feeling right now, after absorbing the terrible news of Commander Tucker’s sudden death. Feeling? Is she even allowing herself to experience her emotions right now? Or is she just using her Vulcan training to lock them away?
“Keep searching,” Archer said from his command chair, his tone and manner grave as well.
The ship pitched to one side as something large and solid collided with the polarized hull plates. “Sorry, Captain,” Mayweather said, not turning from his post. “We’re flying almost blind here.”
Almost as if on cue, the forward viewscreen lit up brightly, illuminating the interstellar flotsam and jetsam that surrounded them. Mayweather knew what it was even before T’Pol verbalized it for the entire bridge. He had seen enough accidents in space while growing up on space freighters to recognize a catastrophic collision.
“I’m showing a warp-core explosion approximately four hundred thousand kilometers ahead,” T’Pol said. “The energy pattern is consistent with the warp signature of the intruder’s vessel.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Mayweather saw that Archer had stood up from his chair and approached the helm controls.
“Take us in slowly, Travis,” he said quietly. “That had to be them. They probably shut down their engines while they were hiding from us, then got creamed by an asteroid. Let’s confirm the wreckage.”
“Yes, sir,” Mayweather said. He half hoped to find escape pods somewhere in the region surrounding the late pirate vessel’s mostly vaporized remains.
The possibility that Commander Tucker’s killers might have died an easy death didn’t sit well with him at all.
Thirteen
The Early Twenty-Fifth Century
Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana
JAKE STIFLED A YAWN behind one hand.
“You’re bored?” Nog asked, surprise in his voice.
Jake turned to his old friend and grinned. “Not at all, just tired. Between the sound of the rain, the warmth of the fire, the wine, and my age, I’m fighting the sandman.”
Nog tilted his head to one side. “Is that another hewmon cultural idiom, or some other reference I should understand but don’t?”
Jake smiled again. “It’s from an old Earth myth. The sandman was the king of dreams. He’s the reason when you wake up you have little bits of grit in the corners of your eyes.”
Nog’s expression was one of simultaneous enlightenment and befuddlement. “Ah, I remember now. And he also brings women the men of their dreams. Like in that song I heard some of the female singers perform back at Vic’s. But I don’t ever have ‘grit’ in my eyes when I wake up.”
“Humans often do,” Jake said. The mention of Vic made Jake nostalgic