The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [209]
She looked at him. Her dark eyes had not only remained aflame, that flame had brightened to a roaring blaze.
Oh, hell, he thought as he took her in his arms and let the conflagration consume them both.
T’Pol could no longer deny the demands of the bond that linked her so inextricably to this emotional, illogical, noble Terran. And she no longer wanted even to try.
They disrobed quickly, urgently, their bodies moving together with abandon, and she experienced it all with the vivid clarity of a lucid dream. Their connection, of course, went far beyond the physical level. It was far more profound than mere transactions of limbic and endocrine systems, hormones and nerve endings. The mind-link that still joined them was no longer stretched thin and taut across interstellar distances. They were together—mentally and spiritually as well as physically—joining and becoming one with a furious intensity that even their memorable Taugus III encounter last year had lacked.
Although Trip had seemed resistant at first, demonstrating the inborn reticence natural to a member of an almost entirely nontelepathic species, her gentle insistence gradually persuaded him to lower his mental barriers as he had the physical ones. T’Pol knew that she lacked schooling in many of the intricacies of the Syrrannite discipline of the mind-meld—when she’d had to meld with Hoshi Sato two years earlier, she had required the guidance of Jonathan Archer, whose brief psionic encounter with Surak had made the captain more adept at the practice than his Vulcan first officer. But her desire to be with Trip, to reduce the space between them to a value of zero or less, to reach or surpass whatever Planck-scale distance might limit the proximity of their two living spirits, guided her.
She knew that he could see, hear, feel, touch, and taste virtually everything in her mind. She felt his internal barriers teeter and fall one by one as he allowed her the very same access to his own awareness, his experiences, his memories, his innermost thoughts and fears and hopes.
In a hailstorm of fast-moving and fragmentary imagery, she saw Trip’s family. His parents, Charles Junior and Elaine. His brother Albert, Bert’s husband Miguel, and their son Owen. His late sister Lizzie, slain by the Xindi. Baby Elizabeth, and the wrenching pain of losing her as well. T’Pol herself, a convergence of fascination and exasperation. Other friends and crewmates, living and dead. Doctor Ehrehin i’Ramnau tr’Avrak and Tinh Hoc Phuong, both of whom became hapless casualties of Romulan treachery. Terix, foe and friend, enemy and ally, a source of anxiety and danger even now.
And Sopek—or was it Ch’uivh?—capturing Trip, Ych’a, and Terix aboard a Vulcan vessel that she knew, courtesy of Trip’s running memories, was moored at the Romulan shipbuilding complex deep in the Achernar system. Standing ghostlike on Sopek’s bridge, T’Pol saw the livid ball of fire and wreckage that had erupted from the exploding the Romulan shipyard.
And then she was standing beside Trip on solid ground, on a Minshara-class world whose sere sky was dominated by a bloated, strangely flattened blue-white star—Achernar, from the look of it, which meant that the planet had to be Achernar II—with no apparent passage of time having followed the successful sabotage mission.
More imagery and sound tumbled past, around, and through her, commingling with sensory inputs of every imaginable kind. It all came in an increasingly frenetic rush as their mutual sharing deepened and the pace of their physical lovemaking grew more urgent, finally building toward a blinding release that forced them both, instinctively, to narrow the bandwidth of their connection and slowly withdraw from each other.
Afterward T’Pol gradually returned to her body, which she noted