The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [74]
A hand gently clasped his shoulder, and he tried to shove it away. “Easy, Commander,” a voice said. Soothing. Familiar.
Trip stopped trying to pull at whatever it was that was covering his eyes, and fell back onto his elbows. “Phuong? Where am I?” And why does my voice sound so different?
“We’re both back on the Branson, Commander,” Trip heard Phuong say. “We left Adigeon Prime a couple of hours ago. We’re already headed for Romulan space.”
“I hope that means that the surgery was a success,” said Trip, his bare feet finding the deck plates as he worked himself into a sitting position. He realized he must be sitting on one of the narrow cots in one of the Branson’s small aft sleeping areas.
“One thing’s for sure, Commander; their anesthetics are certainly effective. Evidently more on you than on me. Let me help you get this bandage off your face.”
Trip felt Phuong’s hands gently set about doing just that. “Why’d they have to cover up my eyes?”
“The Adigeons said something about having to install a protective inner eyelid. Something unique to Romulans, apparently. They wanted it left covered for at least an hour after they gave us the last of the tissue regeneration treatments.”
The bandages abruptly fell away from Trip’s eyes and he suddenly found himself blinking against a swirl of harsh light. Although the light fixture in the sleeping area seemed a little too bright to his dilated pupils, his eyes seemed to adjust very quickly to the abrupt disappearance of the darkness into which he’d awakened.
“Looks like the Adigeons do pretty good inner-eyelid work,” Trip said, his gaze lighting on the face from which Phuong’s voice had evidently come.
While the face in question was still clearly humanoid in appearance, it was one that Trip almost didn’t recognize- but for certain unexpectedly familiar features. One of these was Phuong’s thick black hair, which had been severely shorn down to a stark bowl cut. Another was his dark eyebrows, which swept sharply upward at their outer edges.
But the most striking change visited upon Phuong was to the tips of his ears, which now tapered gracefully upward into points. Except for the presence of a subtle but clearly noticeable brow ridge, Trip could have sworn he was staring into the face of a Vulcan.
Trip rose to his feet, and his words came out in a hoarse whisper. “Tinh, are you sure the Adigeons got your order right?”
Phuong’s right eyebrow rose and he grinned in a decidedly un-Vulcan way. “We’d both better hope so, Commander.” He placed a hand on Trip’s shoulder and steered him toward the head at the rear of the cabin.
Trip saw his reflection in the mirror over the gun-metal gray washbasin and came to an abrupt stop. He raised his hands to a face that he doubted his own mother would have recognized.
He couldn’t tear his gaze away from his own set of distinctly Vulcanoid ears, which were accented by a prominent brow ridge, a thick mane of dark brown hair, and nearly black eyebrows canted at a steep angle that reminded Trip of the windshield-wipers on some of the old gasoline-powered ground vehicles his grandfather used to spend his summers restoring and repairing.
If only T’Pol could see me now, he thought, approaching the mirror more closely in order to study his new face in greater detail. After concluding that he looked like a Vulcan with a forehead concussion, he examined the rest of his face with an intensity he usually reserved for complex technical diagrams. His eye color had been darkened almost to black, the width of his nose and mouth had increased slightly, and even his skin color had subtly changed, taking on an almost pale green cast.
“So the Romulans must be kissing cousins of the Vulcans,” Trip said at length, his eyes still riveted to the face in the mirror. “Wonder if the Vulcans have known it all along, but decided to keep it to themselves.”