The ship's running lights were lowered, simulating night time; it had been established long since that even humans who worked in shifts, as those on starships did perforce, benefited from clearly defined 'night and day'.
It followed that even though many posts were still occupied and routine work had to be carried out, the off-duty crew tended to keep the noise down during the so-called 'hours of darkness'.
But never, in all his life, had the hours seemed so dark to Jonathan Archer, and never since coming on board ship had the shadows in the corridors seemed to have a hidden life of their own. Even on the dark day his father had finally lost his long battle with Clarke's Disease he'd never felt such all-consuming loss. Maybe because that was because the last two years of Henry Archer's life had been a misery of pain and mental deterioration, and death had come as a merciful release. Maybe because his father's death had brought with it no unbearable burden of guilt, no stunning disbelief, no rending shock. Maybe because his father hadn't been…..
The prospect of eating had been unthinkable. He wasn't hungry. He still wasn't. He fed Porthos because that was what he did in the evenings, not because he realized the dog needed food. He didn't see the little beagle's anxious expression or drooping tail. He responded to the insistently thrusting head beneath his hand because that was what he did in that situation. For no other reason at all.
He hadn't notified Starfleet yet. He couldn't imagine himself forming the words. And Maxwell would want information beyond the bare facts: reasons, explanations … things beyond his power to conjure up. The bare facts were more than he could cope with right now.
And after Starfleet… Trip's parents. Charles and Ellen.
How the hell was he supposed to tell them? What the hell was he supposed to say? What should he reveal, what should he withhold, how much did they actually need to know about the scene he'd stumbled into when that damned shuttlepod door finally opened?
He didn't know that his thumb had pressed the comm button until Phlox answered.
"No change, Captain. I will inform you immediately of any developments."
The doc sounded dead tired. Hardly surprising. Over five hours in surgery, and it still hung in the balance whether all that effort had been for anything.
He closed the channel without saying anything. Probably the Denobulan would understand; the whole ship was in a state of shock. People were tiptoeing around the corridors as though a careless footfall would set the whole superstructure crumbling. Crewmembers who passed him cast him surreptitious, pleading glances as though he must have some kind of explanation for what had happened, as though if he wanted to he could just wave a magic wand that would make it all perfectly rational and reasonable for Trip to be….
He swallowed. For Trip to be dead.
Suddenly his quarters seemed too confining. He pressed Porthos away, gently but firmly, and walked to the door.
How often had Trip come lounging through it, a couple of beers dangling carelessly from one hand, to discuss the day's doings or the next day's plans? Or sometimes just to reminisce about the old days, to have a laugh over the long months of suspense during the ship's fitting out, while the Vulcans bellyached over Humanity's readiness for the dangers inherent in deep space travel and he and AG vied with each other over who would finally be chosen to sit in the Big Chair of Earth's first Warp 5 capable starship.
He stepped out into the corridor. Out of habit he almost turned towards the Mess-hall, but turned aside sharply; tonight he couldn't bear to see what he knew he would, the faces drawn with shock and grief, and hear whispered conversations suddenly muted when the whisperers realized he was there. Whispers on one topic, one topic only, the same one that reverberated around the ship:
What the hell happened?
The medics wouldn't talk. He'd had enough wits left to order them to say nothing to anyone till he gave them permission, not to talk even between themselves about what they'd seen. He hoped that would be enough, hoped they'd be able to restrain themselves from feeding one or two tidbits into the starving rumor mill. Human nature being what it is, the temptation would be there. But the ramifications of such an event as this would be enormous. As soon as Admiral Forrest was notified, there was only one order he could give: return to Earth for a tribunal to be convened. And witnesses into what could potentially turn into a criminal investigation are not supposed to discuss what they've seen or heard or thought, for fear of corrupting their testimony.
A criminal investigation. The words almost made his head swim when he imagined them applied to one of his most trusted officers. But then nothing in his world had made sense ever since he'd stepped up into that shuttlepod.
He walked without will, without a conscious destination, perhaps trying to outpace the memories that were printed on his mind. He was tired – no, he was exhausted – but sleep was further from him than it had ever been. The last thing he wanted to do right now was to lie down, turn the light off and shut his eyes.
He hesitated beside T'Pol's door. For all that his XO had taken the news with Vulcan stoicism, he suspected she wasn't quite as unmoved as she'd tried to project. Sure, she'd shown Trip nothing but supercilious disdain – and outright bad manners – that day they were first introduced, but since then the inevitable and frequent interaction between the two of them during the course of the ship's working day had seen a small but noticeable sea change. They still bickered occasionally, and Trip wasn't – hadn't been – above poking gentle fun at her behind her back, but somehow the ill-will had gone out of it, to be replaced by something perilously approaching affection, on his part at least. Quite how she'd felt was more of a problem to determine, but certainly she'd begun to respond to his increasingly teasing manner with less asperity and more tolerance.
Had she been Human, Jonathan would probably have pressed the chime and gone in to ask if she was okay. As it was, he suspected she was probably meditating, and that was probably the best healing she was likely to find right now.
Unable to sleep, unable to stop, he walked on around the darkened ship, an uneasy, restless ghost haunting the all-but-empty corridors.
Hoshi had been so distraught he'd asked Crewman Cutler to give her a shot to help her sleep. At a guess, there would be more than a few calls on Sickbay's resources, though he passed the gymnasium and caught sight of Travis in there, pumping iron with a single-mindedness that suggested he wasn't in the mood for conversation, let alone sleep.
He didn't know he was going to Sickbay until the doors hissed shut behind him and Phlox turned from the laboratory table with a look of inquiry.
He didn't want to turn and look at the single occupied bed in the curtained-off Intensive Care area, but his feet turned him anyway, and carried him to the side of it, where they stopped.
Phlox accompanied him. He wasn't quite sure why. Maybe it was just in case.
Reed was unconscious, deeply sedated after major surgery. He was hooked up to a saline drip and yet another bag of blood – presumably his system still needed some topping up. He lay completely still, his eyelashes motionless on his colorless cheeks. A couple of days' stubble showed black along his jaw, lending him an absurdly piratical appearance at odds with his usual impeccably clean-shaven look.
There was something lying on top of the night-stand beside him, something that looked out of place among the rest of the medical paraphernalia there. It was protected in a sealed plastic bag, but Phlox had been well aware of the requirements regarding evidence from a crime scene: it was still smeared with blood.
Silently Jonathan picked up the bag, handling it by the top end to keep any additional pressure away from the weapon within, and held it up to look at it more closely.
It was definitely not Starfleet issue. Made of some kind of bone, slender and sharp, with a serrated blade and a hilt that had been carved with a criss-cross pattern, presumably to provide grip.
The knife that had….
Vomit rushed up in his throat. He spun around and raced towards the bathroom but couldn't get there in time. His stomach was empty, but bile splattered on the floor as he retched and heaved, leaning on a handy trolley.
Phlox helped him up on to the nearest bio-bed. "Captain, you need to rest," he said kindly, fetching him a handful of paper towels and some water to rinse his mouth.
Jonathan rinsed and spat into the bowl the doctor was holding for him. "I need to find out what happened in that shuttlepod," he replied grimly.
The Denobulan sighed. "Captain, there is no guarantee that Mister Reed will survive till morning. Unless he does, and unless we find some account in the shuttlepod's logs, you may have to accept that we never will know exactly what happened."
The captain stared back at that occupied bed, and the still figure lying in it. At the man who might not survive the night, and who was the only one who could provide answers to the questions that were robbing him of sleep.
He'd given himself till tomorrow before he faced the ordeal of listening to the shuttle logs. He dreaded what he might have to listen to. But the initial examination of them had suggested that the last recording had been made some while before… before….
Grief surged in him again. He was experiencing these emotions in waves, washing over him and sending him tumbling out of control before they eventually ebbed again, leaving him stranded on the wasteland of his loss. He'd sent Trip out in that shuttlepod, thinking almost nothing of it. It was just a routine test, trialing Shuttlepod One's targeting scanners; the sort of thing that just had to be done every now and then, and he hadn't dreamed this time would be any different. But then, he hadn't expected the collision with the Tesnian ship either. One minute it was an ordinary First Contact (with pleasant-seeming aliens for once), and the next thing anyone knew, the vessel that had been maneuvering to dock with Enterprise had suddenly yawed, rolled and delivered an almighty smack to the underside of the Earth vessel that had torn her launch bay door off.
It certainly hadn't been a deliberate attack, and only the almost immediate launch of lifeboats from the stricken Tesnian ship had saved a huge loss of life as it plowed into a nearby asteroid and disintegrated. The next few hours had been fully occupied with their new and unexpected passengers, shocked and distressed and apologetic, followed by the inevitable, unscheduled trip to Tesnia to take them home. All of that time he'd barely spared a thought for the two men in the shuttlepod, except for reassuring himself that none of this was any problem, because even with the extra journey Enterprise would be back at the scheduled rendezvous point long before the shuttlepod could be expected there.
As soon as the Tesnians were restored to their home planet, he'd ordered the ship to get underway again, not even waiting for the fulsome thanks of the Tesnian government. It wasn't as if he'd suspected anything, even then, but Space (as the Vulcans had never tired of pointing out) was a dangerous place. Sure, it wasn't as though the two officers out there were inexperienced; he had every confidence in their ability to handle a tough situation with professional competence. Maybe it was just the demonstration of how suddenly and completely a seemingly ordinary situation could turn into a potential catastrophe that had unsettled him.
Still, there hadn't seemed any particular reason to hurry. After all, there wasn't going to be anything out of the ordinary for the ship to do in the asteroid field if they arrived early, except hang around while his stellar cartography people did some more of their stuff and listen to T'Pol remarking that Vulcans didn't find asteroids interesting.
It had only been thanks to his XO's vigilance, however, that that far distant explosion had not gone unnoticed. Now, it was plain that for some reason the 'pod's engines had been detached before the detonation took place. (Had they developed a fault, or been blown up deliberately? With any luck, the shuttle logs would reveal that at least.) Although it had been impossible to identify exactly what had happened, the fear that his officers could be in danger had been strong enough to order the captain to 'put the pedal to the metal' as the old saying had it.
Hard, but not hard enough. Fast, but not fast enough. Soon, but not soon enough.
The 'pod had been intact. His relief at that discovery had been premature.
He'd entered it to find his old buddy, his Chief Engineer, lying dead across a bench, his throat opened like that of a slaughtered deer.
In front of him, half-sprawled in a pool of frozen scarlet on the floor, frenziedly jabbing something into his own blood-covered thighs, was his Tactical Officer.
Malcolm Reed.
Murderer.