Disclaimer: I don't own any of the rights to anything Star Trek. That credit goes to Paramount/CBS. I am only playing with the characters and their environment. I am not making any money off of this. I am doing this for plain old fun. Any of the ideas that seem to come from the TV show Dark Angel belong to 20th Century Fox. And any of the ideas that seem to come from the Resident Evil franchise belong to Capcom. No copyright infringement is meant. Thanks.

I kind of left eveyone hanging with the last chapter, so I thought I'd add this one too. In it I try to explain a little more about Archer and Mac's connection, just a little, and also explain a little more about Mac's condition. I don't want to give everything away, yet. I tried to be as medically correct as I could. If I goofed, I'm sorry. All is not well, as you will see. I thought I'd make things more complicated with throwing in some obsevations that T'Pol and Trip will make. Please read and review. Thanks again to RadcliffePotter for being my beta. She is amazing!!

Chapter 10

"Mac, what's wrong?" Archer stared at her in confusion. She had closed her eyes, gone tense, and was moaning. It worried him. The Captain touched her shoulder and all the wild sensations she was feeling poured into him. The warm and erotic ambiance spread throughout his body. He convulsed with it. He moaned too and his legs gave way under him. He fell to the floor.

"What the hell's happenin' to them?" Trip demanded, really concerned. He leapt to his feet, but T'Pol held him back.

"I don't think it would be wise to touch them," was all she said. Trip gave her a quizzical look, but heeded her advice.

Hoshi came to join the other two watching the show in front of them. She didn't understand what was happening either. Was the Captain alright? What was wrong with Mac? After several tense moments the sensory memory faded and died away. Hoshi noticed that Mac appeared to gain control of herself, but Archer stayed put, breathing hard on the floor. He was still reeling from the stimulus Mac had provided him with. That had been incredible. The images he had seen, along with the intense impressions nearly undid him, made him ache for Mac. If Mac could make him feel like this with just a touch, what else could she do? What was going on?

Mac stood up abruptly trying to compose herself more fully. "I'm so sorry about that," she said, her face beet red with embarrassment. "I didn't know I could pass those sensations on to other people."

"What just happened exactly?" Archer asked from the floor not being able to keep a goofy grin off on his face. "And does that happen to you often?"

Mac wasn't sure how to explain it. It wasn't something that normally happened to her, at least not that she could remember. "I, uh, um, I've uh, I've only had it happen once before," she stammered. "It was when you came to see if I was happy with my choice of quarters. I was standing in the bedroom, just checking it out, and all of a sudden, out of the blue, a sensory memory hit me. I literally relived the memory, like it was happening right then. For some reason they uhhhh, they uhhhh, they tend to be rather intimate," she finally got out. That was an understatement. It had been so intimate Archer couldn't move.

"So this is only the second time you have experience an event like this?" T'Pol asked, trying to appear neutral. Something tugged at her awareness that made T'Pol realize that she should find this situation familiar, but she couldn't fully place what about it was familiar or why.

"That would be an affirmative," Mac said as she paced the room. "I think seeing Dr. Phlox right now might be a good idea."

"Agreed," T'Pol replied, relieved at Mac's suggestion. "I will have Chief Suran contact him and have him join us."

"What about the Captain?" Hoshi asked with concern.

"I'll be fine, Ensign, really," he said in a slurred, drunken voice.

Hoshi looked at her captain skeptically. He certainly didn't sound alright. Her attention was taken away from him, however, as Mac experienced another sensory memory. She couldn't get Khan or his beautiful body out of her mind. She should never have thought about him so much. She hated him so badly, but she also desired him just as badly or at least she thought she had. It was the Chimera that really had wanted Khan. She had loved his strength and power, along with how he tried to nurture her and let her dominate Mac. And it seemed from her point of view like just a few days ago she had been in his arms. Time has passed differently for her in cryogenic sleep. The transgenic was so conflicted over the Eugenic tyrant. All she had wanted to do was destroy him, but yet in the end she had let him live, had let him escape. As the pleasurable vibrations hit her again, she collapsed on the floor next to Archer, until it finally passed. No one dared touch her in that state this time.

Ten minutes later Phlox arrived and moved them all to a room in the palace where he had been able to set up a mini lab. It didn't have everything he needed, but it would suffice for when he couldn't have access to all his equipment on abroad the Enterprise. Right now, the Vorlorens were not allowing Mac off the forested moon, so he ushered his patients to the mini lab located on a lower level in the palace. The doctor first scanned Mac with one of his portable medical scanners, and then used some of the Vorloren medical scanning machines. He also ran scans of the Captain.

Phlox's scans discovered a large amount of activity going on in Mac's cerebrum. The cerebrum was the largest part of the human brain, as well as the most evolved part. It controlled a person's perception, imagination, thought, judgment, and decision-making abilities. The doctor recalibrated his medical scanner to center in on the temporal lobe area of Mac's cerebrum. The stimulation throughout her temporal lobe was off the chart. Phlox zoomed in even more to view the inner areas of Mac's temporal lobe.

The temporal lobe of the human cerebrum carried out a wide variety of functions, like allowing a person to interpret sounds, understand language, recognize words and numbers, and it aided in helping people recognize the faces of those around them. Phlox was more interested in the rolled it played in memory formation and recall. The inner areas of the temporal lobe were closely connected with the functioning of the hippocampus, which was devoted to the memorization of experienced events, sometimes called episodic memory.

The highest concentration of activity was here. The over stimulation Mac's episodic memory center was receiving was most likely the cause of her vivid sensory memories. She was recalling specific events she had once experienced as if they were happening to her now in the present. The transgenic woman not only remembered the events from her past, but she was being bombarded with the entire original sensory input and the entire emotional and biological responses to those inputs. At this point, Phlox could only hypothesize as to why this Mac's hippocampus and temporal lobe were so active, but the signals her hippocampus was receiving were the reason she was reliving past events.

The Denobulan doctor had the gut feeling that part of the problem stemmed from Mac being cryogenically frozen for a hundred and fifty years. All of Mac's chemicals, hormones, neurotransmitters, and protein molecules had been unbalanced before she was put into stasis. It now seemed as if all the years of inactivity had made the original imbalances even worse. The other gut feeling he had about Mac's condition was that the constant repression of Mac's animalistic side was backfiring on her. Without any conscious outlet for the conflict, her mind and body found their own way to deal with her opposing sides, the vivid sensory memories. Her mind and body were trying to balance themselves by giving the build up of restrained and divergent emotions and instincts a means of release. But it wasn't working. It was making things worse.

As Phlox widened his scan again, he noticed that Mac's hypothalamus and pituitary gland functions were erratic as well. It appeared as if her whole endocrine system was going ballistic. It was dumping hormones into her bloodstream, but not distributing them properly throughout her body, and it wasn't creating a negative feedback loop to decrease or stop the release of the hormones. What worried him most were the readings he saw around her adrenal glands, located above her kidneys. They were depositing huge amounts of adrenaline into her system. The speed of her heartbeat and the force of each beat were continually increasing. Mac was designed to have her body run at an accelerated rate, but even her body wouldn't be able to handle the increasing stress forever. Her blood pressure and blood flow were steadily building too.

The doctor was concerned because nothing in Mac's body was telling it to stop or slow down. He diagnosed that the super solider needed a way to release endorphins into her bloodstream that could act in her system like a sedative, or a counteractive agent to the high stimulation. In most humans, endorphins acted as a pain reliever or had an analgesic effect to sooth the body. Mac's acted that way too, but they could also balance out all the unnatural levels of her hormones. For some reason, however, Mac was not releasing endorphins. It must have been a defect in her design.

"It seems to me," he told his audience of T'Pol, Archer, Trip, Hoshi, and Chief Suran, "that the scientists that spliced Mac's DNA together, although they were clearly geniuses, were only human, and made a few miscalculations along the way." Then he explained all his findings to them.

"What can we do, Phlox?" Archer asked extremely worried after listening to Phlox's diagnosis.

"Can you not synthesize the endorphins McKenna needs to bring her hormone levels down to an acceptable level?" T'Pol, ever the scientist herself, questioned. The same awareness she had experienced earlier tried again to come forward, but it stopped short of a realization. T'Pol should understand what this reminded her of, but she couldn't quite grasp it. It was right there, but just out of reach.

Phlox had thought of that already. "They wouldn't do her any good. The Gen Virus would see them as an infection or as foreign substances in her blood and neutralize them before they could be of any help to her."

"Are there natural ways her own body could produce the endorphins she needs?" Hoshi chimed into the conversation. "Is there something she could do to make her body recognize her need?"

"I can think of a few suggestions," Phlox told them. "It would be up to Mac to decide which would work best for her."

Mac was only half listening to the conversation. Her brain felt like it was going to ooze out of her skull and the Chimera was roaring angrily at her. The Captain gave her a concerned look and reached out to stroke her cheek. Mac instantly felt the Chimera react to his touch, like a cat that loved to be scratched just under its chin. She liked Jonathan's warmth and his soft touch. "What are your suggestions, Phlox?" Archer requested of the doctor.

Phlox laid out the situation. "McKenna needs to engage in some type of extremely aerobic, stressful, and painful activity to make her body acknowledge the need to produce its own endorphins. Mac has been in stasis for a hundred and fifty years. That's a long time for her to not be active and apparently she needs to be active to get her body to realize it needs to release endorphins. Endorphins are released from the pituitary gland during times of pain or stress. Vigorous, bodily activity induces acidosis to occur in the blood when the flow of oxygen to the muscles starts to decrease. Anaerobic respiration causes lactic acid to accumulate in the muscles. Acidosis is what stimulates the pituitary to release endorphins. The endorphins block neurotransmitters from sending pain signals to the brain, acting as a painkiller. This painkilling effect can also result in a state of euphoria, which is typical of many analgesics. Releasing enough endorphins should help stabilize Mac's bodily systems. It will hopefully balance her out by getting her endocrine system to function the way it should."

"You me like a 'runner's high'?" Hoshi commented.

"Precisely," Phlox came back at her. "Things like say, swimming, running, dancing, sparing, biking, playing a sport, or mating, could all be an activity Mac could try and see if she can push herself hard enough to release the endorphins. Most of what is happening in her body has a physiological cause. But there is something else that is blocking Mac's ability to regulate her endocrine system, and it's a much more psychological cause."

"She fights too hard with herself," Archer supplied for the doctor, understanding Mac's inner turmoil was to blame for some of her condition. The Captain didn't fail to notice the last activity Phlox mentioned. A part of him desperately wanted for her to pick that one and ask him to join her.

"Exactly," the doctor finally smiled. "She needs to pick an activity that her savage side will embrace as well. I believe her internal conflict is a key root of the problem, and only through consensus of both parts of her nature can the problem be overcome. What do you think Mac?"

All eyes turned to her and the transgenic felt put on the spot. There was a part of her that craved to do the last activity that Phlox mentioned. Her beast liked that suggestion too, especially with Jonathan's hand touching her cheek. She rubbed her cheek against his palm, allowing the tingling sensation to travel down her spine. The suggestion appealed to her more reasonable side as well, but she wanted to be with Jonathan because she wanted him as a mate, not because she needed him as a medicine. The Chimera wanted to argue with Mac, but then they both had a thought that they liked almost as much. It would have the same effect, but would be more prudent under the current circumstances and not get them into anymore trouble. Even the Chimera did not want to cause more trouble for her Jonathan.

Part of the thrill of the wild was running free within it. One did not always have to run through the forest with a purpose, such as on a hunt or to flee danger. Running free amongst nature and all it had to offer was very appealing to Mac and the Chimera. No restraints, no holding back, no cage, and no fear. The Chimera could be truly set free and so could Mac. Both of them could enjoy the rush of running through the majestic landscape just outside the palace walls.

A feeling of convergence that Mac had never quite felt before settled over her. For once she and her beast had agreed on something completely. It was a compromise of sorts. The beast could be let out, not to kill, but to run free, without fear or worry of being punished. The Chimera could have some control, while Mac didn't have to give up all of hers. "A long, hard, and strenuous run sounds ideal to me," Mac finally said, really pleased with the decision she and the Chimera had made. Both were confident that the mating suggestion the doctor had given could be indulged in at a later and more pleasurable time with their Jonathan. For when the transgenic made the decision to mate, it would be for keeps, not for a momentary flash of gratification. Mac and her beast had learned that lesson the hard way from Khan. Both needed more than the Eugenic tyrant had ever really given them.

Throughout the entire conversation Trip couldn't help but noticed that way Archer was rubbing Mac's cheek. It bothered him and he didn't know why. Phlox had briefed him and T'Pol about the affect that the Captain could have on the super soldier. Something in Archer's genome elicited a positive response from Mac's primitive side, so close contact was a good thing to help control her beast. Still, seeing the Captain touch Mac upset Trip. He couldn't fathom why. The chief engineer had to mentally restrain himself from knocking his superior and friend on his ass. What was the matter with him? It didn't make any sense. He had no reason to be jealous of Archer. Trip now considered Mac a friend, someone he wanted to help, someone he cared about, but why did he suddenly feel so possessive of her? He'd have understood the feelings if it had been T'Pol in Mac's place, but Mac wasn't T'Pol. Mac wasn't his mate, T'Pol technically was, but Mac could be if he was strong enough to take her. Now where in the hell did that thought come from? Trip wondered at a loss to explain where his mind had just gone.

The commander was hopelessly confused. He wanted to lean on T'Pol, gather aid from her Vulcan calmness and focus. He needed an emotional anchor right now. The chief engineer looked over at the Vulcan woman who seemed to know he was troubled. He saw it in her eyes. T'Pol didn't know exactly what he was thinking about when Trip's eyes found hers, but she knew Trip was agitated. He repeatedly changed his hands from resting in the back pockets of his blue jeans to resting them in the front pockets, or he would smooth out his white button down shirt over and over, like he was trying to rein himself in or make himself relax. It was a battle he wasn't winning. The science officer knew she needed to speak to him later. She realized that something was definitelywrong with him.

Phlox had found problems within Archer's scans as well. The Captain's bodily systems were also over stimulated way too much for Phlox's comfort. Archer's testosterone levels were almost fifty percent higher than normal. This fact was beginning to show in some of the more aggressive behavior the Captain was exhibiting, like his anger towards Trip the other evening. Archer's adrenaline, serotonin, and dopamine levels were all far beyond the normal range for an average human male. All of those chemicals were causing the Captain's emotions to be highly aroused, his heart rate to be elevated, and they would start to interfere with his ability to sleep, concentrate, or maintain a steady body temperature. Archer seemed to have a slight and constant fever. It seemed to Phlox that Mac was having the opposite effect on the Captain that he was having on her. Where he calmed her and allowed her to think more clearly, she made him more restless and brought his primal instincts closer to the surface. It seemed that helping Mac balance herself would be the only way of helping the Captain return to normal as well. The doctor needed to delve deeper into what was in the Captain's genetic make-up that reacted with Mac's. It still eluded him.

It was right after the doctor's explanation about Archer's condition that the tugging in the back of T'Pol's mind found a way to break forth into her conscious mind. Phlox's suggestions of activities for Mac to try had been key to her realization, especially when he had said "mating". She now knew why these problems Mac and the Captain were having were so familiar. It related to something very private, very guarded, and very deeply disturbing to Vulcans. No one outside of Vulcan society was ever told about it. There were times in every Vulcan's life where all logic and reason was ripped from them and they were left to be ruled by primal, animalistic instincts. It was why Vulcans had a mate chosen for them when they were young, so when that time came, the needs it brought with it could be met with the least amount of attention or possible complications. The only alternative was death. The chemicals in a Vulcan's body became so unbalanced, that unless they satisfied the need to mate, they would die. T'Pol didn't know whether to find the similarities with a Vulcan's pon farr and what was happening with Mac and her affect on the Captain horrifying or fascinating. Humans should not be experiencing this type of condition. It wasn't in their biology.

Archer now turned to Chief Suran, who had been standing quietly in the background taking in all that was said. "Would you give us permission to go for a run around the lake?"

Aster ran a translucent hand through his short, black hair. "If your doctor can assure me that it is necessary and safe."

"It's absolutely necessary," Phlox was adamant. "And I think it's relatively safe."

"I'll agree only if you allow a full contingency of Vorloren guards and your MACOs to monitor your position at all times," Aster told the Captain firmly. "You'd be going with the lady I presume?"

"Of course," Archer replied.

"Good," he said to Archer. He turned to Mac, "I want to help you, milady," he told her, "but I don't fully trust you yet."

Mac understood completely. She was relieved that Chief Suran was being cautious, but lenient too. "I will try and earn your trust, Chief," she said sincerely.

"We shall see," Aster replied. He hoped that Romdel really knew what he had gotten his people into. Aster liked the humans, and he liked Mac, but she scared him, and fear was never a good emotion for a Chief of Security to feel.

TBC

What do you think? Please let me know. Am I doing okay? Thanks soooo much!!!!