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It's him.
There's no possible doubt about it.
I sit now in the shuttle as it approaches Enterprise, my guts turning somersaults while inside my head memory and speculation chase and wrestle like a pair of polecats, one blurring into the other with eye-defeating speed. My thoughts keep going back and back to the afternoon I finally sat down and started studying the ship's complement, and to the moment of revelation that came like a thunderclap, jerking me backwards in my seat. The moment when a face I recognized stared back at me from the screen, a little older and with the unmistakable marks of experience, but unmistakably him.
After all these years, I finally have his name. Not Alastair, of course.
Malcolm.
The surname was a bit of a letdown. Maybe there was a Castle Reed somewhere around England, I didn't know, but it didn't have quite the aristocratic ring to it that I'd expected. That said, maybe there was a minor Reed lordling somewhere in the Conqueror's train; a Sir Malcolm de Reed, whose services rendered earned him a decent little parcel of land around Lincolnshire, if not a starring role in the pages of history.
Crap. Even to myself, I'm starting to sound a little hysterical.
That 'services rendered' phrase threatens to set off a whole new train of thought that's anything but appropriate to the time and place, though. Time should have faded the memories. It hasn't. It'd just slowly slid them away into a cupboard, ready to spring back out on demand, as vivid as though it was yesterday. His body pressing fiercely against me, his hands tangling in my hair, the hardness in his pants pressing against mine….
I've had far too much experience to let anything show on my face, of course. The captain certainly won't see anything other than the brisk competent officer he's undoubtedly been promised, and I have every intention of living up fully to General Casey's recommendation. Even my junior officers sharing the locker seat opposite me won't catch on that there's anything amiss, though McKenzie's known me for a good while and normally catches the drift fast enough. This thing I have going on now is so intensely private, so personal, that I've made absolutely sure that my professional demeanor is rock solid. I haven't done or said a damn thing that wouldn't pass the most searching scrutiny; my preparations for the mission were one hundred per cent committed and waterproof.
It hadn't helped much that the debriefings had contained so little concrete information, but then hardly any mission has as much intel as those planning it would wish for in an ideal world. It was definitely a new one to find out the basis on which this whole expedition was being launched (the story about an interview with some 'guy from the future' aboard an alien ship was the sort of thing I'd normally expect to feature in one of those trashy magazines you see on newsstands where sad people spill out their delusions for a few moments of fame and a couple of dollars), but Captain Archer isn't the sort of person I could imagine going in for far-fetched alien abduction stories. He's been out there dealing with real alien abductions, and presumably knows how to separate fact from fiction. Though it wasn't hard to draw the conclusion that there were people even in the top echelons of Starfleet who wondered about that, because it was impressed on me that this part of the story was strictly classified, and for my ears only. Given the amount of pressure that's still being brought to bear by those who think Enterprise has no business going out there on a wild-goose chase rather than being kept at home to defend Earth, I could imagine that if this got out there would be hell to pay from that direction.
I can still hardly get my mind around the identity of Archer's Tactical Officer, though. I was on a mission when Enterprise first launched; the furor about it passed as just another news item, the Fleeters achieving another milestone in warp technology and eighty-plus people setting off looking for adventure. Maybe if I'd paid more attention there might have been information on the officers among the broadcasts, but I had far more important things on my mind just then than a Starfleet launch. Or so I thought….
My musings have taken up the couple of minutes it took for the shuttle to reach the ship. Looking out of the viewscreen, I see the launch bay doors opening in the underbelly, and the grappler arm being deployed.
He's somewhere in that huge silver vessel that's going to be my home for the duration of the mission. Maybe he's watching the shuttle approach. Maybe he's already received the documentation from the admin department and gone through the files on his computer, bringing up the photographs. I left strict orders for the complete works to be sent up to Enterprise in advance – it wouldn't be the best start at all to our working relationship for me to arrive on board unannounced, making it look like he's already reduced to a cipher in the scheme of things. On both a personal and a professional level, that's the very last thing I want him to feel.
If he has gone through the documents, would he have recognized me?
If he recognized me, how would he react?
Heck, get a grip on yourself – this is a mission to save Earth, and you're mooning like a lovesick teenager! I square my shoulders. Anyone who noticed it would think it was just the slight shock from the grappler arm contact being transmitted through the shuttle's frame. It all happened a long time ago. We were very different people then. Surely we can find some way to make peace?
It has to be admitted, though, that 'peace' isn't exactly what I want. Even now. As soon as his photograph flicked onto the computer screen as part of my pre-mission briefing I'd felt the instant smack of lust. Nothing had changed in that respect, at least for me.
But I had to acknowledge – and remind myself repeatedly ever since – that people change. Of course I'd gone through his Starfleet records, trying to find out where he'd been and what he'd done all these years, but I came up against a solid brick wall. It seemed he'd been a Fleeter even the first time we met, working in their Security arm, but as for his job, that was another Classified. Probably something to do with Intelligence. His security clearance is pretty damned high – much higher than my own, actually. His academic qualifications are extremely impressive, even for a Starfleet officer: honors in both warp-field technology and weapons design as well as a whole string of lesser certifications.
So he's the Head of Security on board Enterprise. The guy who probably won't be one bit pleased by my arrival, even if he remembers me at all from … well, from that other time. But hopefully our first experience of field action will convince him that having MACOs aboard is a good thing after all, because the bottom line is that we're expendable, the soldier ants of the colony. Our job is to protect the ship, and if we die achieving that, we've done our duty. General Casey was clear on that, and I've put it hard and plain to the men and women I'm going to command on board ship. Whatever they may feel about us, the Fleeters are the valuable ones as far as the mission's concerned. They have the know-how to run the ship and do whatever it takes to find the Xindi. We're there to make sure they live to do it – no more, no less. Their survival is our success. If the ship goes down, so do humanity's best chance of survival. Or at least, the best chance (some think) of averting the second strike which 'the guy from the future' had predicted.
It's probably going to take us a while to find the bastards responsible for the attack. The waiting will be difficult. We all want to get into action, want to strike back fast and hard, hitting whatever it takes to ensure there'll never be another attack like the first – as well as handing out some kind of payback for the seven million innocent victims of that damned probe. Showing the perpetrators as well as anyone else who might be interested that you don't just turn up and burn a damn big slice into Planet Earth without there being consequences.
Consequences… so here we are, back again where we started. Every action has a consequence. Even a lack of action has consequences.
I have no idea, even now, why the heck I panicked the way I did; I'm not usually the sort of guy who cuts and runs when things don't go to plan. And I've regretted so often that I did, instead of trying to work things out, make amends. How different everything might have been if I hadn't given into that stupid impulse to bolt, or even if I'd been able to find him again when I'd gone searching. If he'd been among the crowds who went back and forth from Starfleet HQ, or if I'd been able to remember which apartment I'd fled from on that morning. I'd have made him listen to me somehow, made him give me another chance. But it never happened, and now I'm going to find out what the consequences of that failure will be.
I usually try not to look too far ahead, at least outside the realms of necessary planning. But as the shuttle settles gently onto the floor of the landing bay, I can't help but feel a shudder of foreboding.
I can feel the future, and there's blood in it.
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