First Light
by HopefulR

Rating: PG

Disclaimer: Star Trek: Enterprise is the property of CBS/Paramount. All original material herein is the property of its author.

Part VI

Chapter Eleven: Braax

As the airlock hatch of the Illyrian research vessel Rykos rolled open, Braax stepped forward to greet the rotund cargo ship captain who emerged. "Welcome," Braax said with weary relief. "We're grateful for your assistance."

"Greetings to you, friend!" the other man replied in an amiable, booming voice. "Captain Braax, is it? I'm Jholli. We Xythians are always glad to help a ship in need."

Braax was somewhat taken aback. The Rykos had not had an easy time of it, but she hardly looked as if she were ready to fall apart. "How did you know that—"

The Xythian cut him off with a wave of his meaty hand. "A lone, tiny vessel in this barren stretch of space so far between systems, limping along at a sludgeworm's pace? Such a sight is akin to an emergency distress call." He peered into the dimly-lit corridor. "You're in a bad way, I see." He smiled wryly. "Actually, I can't see much at all."

Braax realized that Jholli must be practically blind in the low lighting. The passengers and crew of the Rykos had long ago become accustomed to it. "We've been conserving power as much as possible," he explained, "to ensure enough for our journey home."

"Surely you must not be far, if you're traveling at impulse," Jholli said reasonably.

Braax's expression darkened. "We have no choice in the matter. Our warp coil was stolen."

The Xythian harrumphed. "Conscienceless vermin, these marauders."

The Illyrian hesitated. "They weren't marauders...exactly," he admitted. "But they might as well have been. We've been traveling at full impulse for months, and we're not even a third of the way home."

"My sympathies!" Jholli exclaimed. He clapped Braax on the back. "But you need worry no longer about getting home. We'll give you a lift the rest of the way, eh? We have plenty of food to spare, and room for you and your crew to stretch your legs. I imagine you could use the change of scenery."

Braax nodded gratefully. "And a change of diet." He grimaced. "Everyone is sick of those ration packs."

Jholli squinted at him in the dimness. "Ration...?"

"Those bane-swine who stranded us," Braax said irritably. "They left food and supplies when they stole the warp coil."

The Xythian looked bemused. "Odd thieves indeed, to leave payment for what they stole."

"They cannot pay back the six months they robbed from us!" Braax declared forcefully. "We were cast adrift, cut off from our families! My first officer, Rossa—his wife has had their child by now, but she doesn't know if her husband is alive or dead. Seeria, one of our research assistants, was on her first assignment—her parents must be consumed with worry for her. Dulow has been ill for weeks, but our medic hasn't been able to determine the cause. The infirmary doesn't have the facilities for proper testing—"

"Easy, friend," Jholli said reassuringly. "I meant no offense. Of course you've had your share of suffering." He pulled out a small hand communicator and spoke into it. "Chandra, this is Jholli. Have Lyro and Dr. Sola come over here." As he tucked the device away again, he explained to Braax, "My engineer and crew physician. Perhaps they can help with your power problem and your sick crewman."

"Thank you." Braax took a deep breath to compose himself. "Our mission was only supposed to last for three weeks." He rubbed his bleary eyes. Spirits, he was tired...so tired. "Three weeks, but we've been out here for six months now." His voice hardened. "If I didn't need to get my people home, I'd take a warp coil from you and go find that bastard Archer myself."

"Archer?" Jholli said in surprise. "The human? Commander of Enterprise?"

Braax nodded. "You've heard of him this far out?"

"Everyone in the region has heard of him." Two of Jholli's crew emerged from the airlock at that moment. He signaled them to wait, then drew Braax off to one side. In an uncharacteristically low voice, he said, "If Archer is the one who marooned you, I can understand your disgruntlement with him. But a word of advice: consider keeping it to yourself, at least until you know you're among friends."

Braax regarded him quizzically. "Why?"

The Xythian shrugged, almost apologetically. "Because virtually every race for two thousand light-years and more regards him as something of a hero."

Braax stared at him, dumbfounded. "What nonsense is this?"

"He hasn't heard, then," murmured the engineer, Lyro, to Jholli.

Braax began leading the trio of Xythians down the shadowy corridor, toward the infirmary. "If I'd heard that, I wouldn't have believed it."

Sola, the physician, spoke up. "But surely, in the past you've run across sections of space that would tear through your ship as if it were putty?"

The Illyrian shuddered at the memory. "Yes, when we first began our research mission. We were thankful to leave that area behind months ago."

"You're mistaken," countered Lyro. "It wasn't you that left the space; it was the space itself that changed."

"There used to be machines all over," Jholli continued. "Spheres the size of planets that were reconfiguring space, turning it into something unlivable for any of us. The cursed things had been here for a thousand years, from what we heard. A few hundred years more, and we would all have been wiped out, every last race of us. All because some space-hungry aliens from another dimension wanted to take up residence here. But Archer and the Xindi—you know of the Xindi, don't you?"

"Archer spoke of them," Braax said dismissively. "He kept going on about his mission to stop them...he said the Xindi had declared war on the humans."

"True enough," Jholli acknowledged. "But somewhere along the way, Archer struck up a truce with the Xindi—some of them, anyway, I'm still not clear on the details—and they destroyed the spheres. Space turned back to normal again, which got rid of those aliens who wanted to take over."

They arrived at the infirmary. As Braax gestured Sola inside, he regarded Jholli with ill-concealed resentment. "Don't tell me," he said, his voice thick with sarcasm. "Naturally, people all over are grateful."

The Xythian captain looked neither defensive nor fawning. "Archer and those Xindi, they saved the region, maybe the whole universe, is what we hear."

"That's just marvelous," Braax muttered sourly. "He was probably arriving home to a victorious welcome while we were still drifting in space, making repairs to the power junction he destroyed."

"I wouldn't know about that," Jholli replied. "All I heard was that he lost a third of his crew. Twenty-six, I think it was."

A sudden chill went through Braax. He stared at the Xythian captain. "Twenty-six...?"

Jholli regarded him with polite concern. "You haven't lost any of your people, have you?"

Mutely, Braax shook his head. His own ship's complement numbered all of nineteen.

"That's a relief," Jholli said with a smile. "But then again, you mentioned having those supplies, didn't you...ration packs and whatnot."

Twenty-six dead... What if Braax had lost a third of his own people? The idea was too ghastly even to imagine. "I've cursed him and his crew for months," he murmured. "I've wished all sorts of terrible fates on them for what they did to us...but I never thought..."

"You didn't know," Jholli said gently. "You were thinking of your crew, which is as it should be." He put a hand lightly on the Illyrian's arm. "Archer wronged you, to be sure. But he was working to save his whole world. And mine...and yours."

Braax looked away. Twenty-six...with spouses and parents and children, just as we have... He didn't want to care. But he was Illyrian—he couldn't turn a blind eye or a cold heart to the suffering of innocents.

"If you'll point the way, Captain," Lyro told him, "I'll get started on your systems."

Numbly, Braax waved a hand further down the corridor. "All the way aft, and down a level. Tell them I sent you."

As Lyro nodded and headed away, Braax turned back toward the infirmary, where the Xythian doctor, Sola, stood in deep discussion with the ship's medic at the bedside of the sick crewman, Dulow.

Jholli leaned against the doorway. "There's another way to look at this," he told Braax. "That warp coil Archer took from you...if it helped him to accomplish what he did, then that makes you and your crew heroes as well, in a sense. Doesn't it?"

Braax's view of the infirmary faded away, replaced by the memory of a dark, smoke-filled engine room, the hum of weapons fire, the distant roar of explosions...and the face of a man he had thought of for months as his sworn enemy. Their parting words echoed in his ears, across space and time...

Why are you doing this?

Because I have no choice.

Braax had assumed then that the look on Archer's face was the cold, selfish disregard of a thief. Now he wondered if that expression had been something entirely different. Perhaps...regret.

Chapter Twelve: Khouri

Susan Khouri recorded the monitor readings from the gestation chamber, noting the time on her chart: 0602, Adjusted Lunar Time.

It felt wonderful to be valued again—not simply as a CNA, though her nurse's aide skills were part of the reason she was here—but as the bioengineering expert she had trained to be. She knew all about Paxton's reasons for creating Terra Prime...preserving the purity of the human race, preventing the encroachment of aliens, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth. Susan had a much more pragmatic reason for throwing in with the organization: job security. She was no xenophobe; she was simply sick of being passed up for jobs in favor of a Vulcan or Denobulan for no reason other than the assumption by the people doing the hiring that the Alien du Jour was better qualified. Specialized careers such as Susan's, in bioengineering research, took years of schooling and experience to establish. To put in the effort, only to be reduced to med tech work, forced to turn her occasional CNA gig into a backup career to supplement her income. At least there were no Vulcans competing for child-care or NICU positions.

She'd kept up her tech work, gritting her teeth as she did the scut work for the offworlders who had been handed the research positions she'd wanted, in order to stay abreast of advances in the field, just in case she saw an opportunity. When Terra Prime approached her, Susan had been practical, concentrating on the support system and job contacts the Primers provided, while politely listening to—and ignoring—their proselytizing. And when Dr. Mercer came calling, offering a unique opportunity to rejoin her field of expertise, Susan had jumped at it.

One whirlwind trip to the Moon later, she was at Orpheus Mining Colony, getting acquainted with her new assignment: a slapdash human/Vulcan clone job forced into an accelerated gestation of only five months, ready to be delivered in less than a week. Obviously, the genetic engineers had done a sloppy job, judging from the baby's depressed lymphatic system and underdeveloped lungs.

Mercer had filled Susan in on Terra Prime's grand plan to show the world the baby as an example of the folly of allowing the human gene pool to be diluted by interbreeding with aliens. Then, after Susan had asked for the real reason the child had been created, and she had refused to budge until she got a straight answer, Mercer had locked the lab door and told her what the rank-and-file Primers didn't know: the details of Paxton's disease, and his hope that the baby's hybrid blood factors would aid in the development of a more effective treatment than the Rigellian gene therapy to which his system was growing resistant.

What an irony that the very aliens the great John Frederick Paxton preached against, day in and day out, were the reason he hadn't dropped dead by age twenty.

Susan glanced into the metal and glassteel enclosure, where the baby floated in her artificial womb of amniotic fluid. —No, not "baby." Creature. Unholy mutant. Vessel for generating blood. Political tool. Weapon in the war to save humanity. Expendable thing. That was the way Paxton thought of her, at any rate. Susan would have to remember that.

She wondered who the parents were. The contributor of the human DNA could be a Primer, but the Vulcan DNA had to have been stolen...from a medical facility, most likely. Susan couldn't imagine a Vulcan cooperating with such a dishonorable scheme as this one.

Through the clear fluid in the chamber, she could see the child's features. They didn't have the angular lines of a Vulcan; they were more human, suggesting Anglo-Saxon ancestry. Had the baby's makers selected for those elfin ears deliberately? Susan doubted they had known what the hell they were doing. Still, despite their obvious ineptitude, the result was delicately beautiful.

As Susan watched, the "unholy mutant" brought one tiny hand to her mouth and began sucking her thumb.

Life for this fragile pixie would be a battle for survival. Days from now, when she was "born," a world of pain awaited, in which every breath would be a struggle, exposure to any germ a life-and-death crisis. But Susan had been surprised countless times by the determination of a tiny preemie to live, despite overwhelming odds.

Paxton wouldn't care whether the baby lived or died, once he had his precious blood samples and he'd made his showy statement about the evil of aliens soiling the purity of humanity. Even Mercer wouldn't care; Susan had figured out after only a day that his allegiance was to Paxton more than to his own Hippocratic oath.

Susan leaned close to the glassteel, until she was inches away from the sleeping child. I care, she conveyed silently to the baby. As long as I don't let on to anyone, we'll be fine, you and I.

The baby stirred, her thumb slipping out of her mouth as she turned, until she was facing Susan directly. Susan could almost imagine that the child had actually heard her thoughts, and was reacting to them.

It made Susan even more determined to watch over this tiny innocent, and do her utmost to keep the child alive, healthy, and safe. To any observer, Susan would be performing a job, like any other job. Her charge was simply a beautiful, half-alien, priceless-blood-producing, future casus belli. No problem. Piece of cake.

Floating in her liquid dreamland, the sleeping child smiled.

-tbc-