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“Captain?” T’Pol said.

Seated in the comm station’s chair, Archer turned toward his exec. “Any objections to my giving the hardest-working communications officer in Starfleet a temporary field promotion to captain?”

T’Pol raised an eyebrow, her manner frostier than usual. “None at all, sir.” Lieutenants Reed and O’Neill murmured their assent as well, while trying to suppress their mirth.

“Good,” Archer said, and reopened the channel. The Cygneti woman reappeared on the screen.

“This is Captain Hoshi Sato, in command of the Starship Enterprise,” Sato said, putting as much authority as she could muster behind her words.

The woman on the screen not only seemed to relax immediately, she seemed to take the conversation far more seriously now than she had before. Within a few minutes of gentle haggling, Sato—with some assistance from T’Pol, who seemed uncharacteristically miffed—had engineered a mutually acceptable arrangement whereby Enterprise would gain access to Cygnet XIV’s most advanced ship-repair facilities for upwards of ten local rotations in exchange for some exotic chemicals that could be synthesized in the ship’s warp core.

And although no one laughed during the proceedings, Sato did come close to losing her composure when T’Pol got even with the captain by coolly ordering him and Lieutenant Reed off the bridge—while in full view of the Cygneti woman—to fetch some Vulcan spice tea for “Captain” Sato, Lieutenant O’Neill, and herself.

Now I’m really glad he talked me out of putting in for that transfer, Sato thought.

She did wonder, however, if D.O. might have gone a bit too far in delivering a good-natured swat to Archer’s backside as he turned to enter the turbolift.

THIRTY-FIVE

Sunday, December 14, 2155

Cochrane Institute

New Samarkand, Alpha Centauri III

AS A GENERAL RULE, Tobin Dax hated to complain. Complainers tended to draw a lot of unwelcome attention to themselves, and usually ended up directing blame at others inappropriately, rather than taking it to heart as a personal learning experience and an encouragement to do better the next time.

But when the most urgent hurry-up research project of his scientific career got interrupted—and on the orders of the very people who always seemed so unwilling to compromise on the deadlines they’d already imposed on that selfsame hurry-up research project, no less—Tobin saw no viable alternative to griping out loud to whoever might listen.

A brisk walk beneath the twin midday orbs of Alpha Centauri A and B took him swiftly across the university’s carefully tended grounds and into the cool shelter of Henry Archer Hall’s main superluminal propulsion research lab complex. A few moments after making it through the sprawling facility’s three layers of biometric security scanners, he caught sight of his two colleagues, both of whom seemed to be quietly reading data from padds in the warp-seven team’s customary work area.

Tobin started giving vent to his fulminations without preamble. “Exactly how are we supposed to finish creating a warp-seven drive prototype when Captain Stillwell drops some other project that’s on fire right into our laps?”

S’chn T’gai Skon, the mathematician on temporary loan to Starfleet from the Vulcan Science Academy, looked up from his padd and raised an eyebrow quizzically. “On fire?”

Dax grimaced. Sometimes he wondered if the universe hadn’t created Vulcans for the sole purpose of deemphasizing his own socialization deficiencies. “I’m talking about this... side project that Starfleet has suddenly gotten so excited about. I mean, I hope Stillwell intends to cut us some slack on our sched—”

“Dax, don’t you ever start a conversation with small talk?” Doctor Pell Underhill said, tossing his own padd onto a nearby desk with a chuckle. “With conversationalists like you around, Tobin, we almost don’t need Vulcans. No offense meant, Skon.”

“None taken, Doctor,” the Vulcan mathematician said in apparent agreement with the Centauri-native human’s sentiment.