The next morning, the Vulcan looked exactly the same as always, but there was a slight hum in the back of Hoshi's mind that hadn't been there before. Focusing instantly on its source, she realized it was more a sound of spatial harmony than an actual physical phenomenon. Could it be the expression of a Vulcan mind at rest? Hoshi catalogued the sound in her auditory memory. She realized she now had a marker to help her know whether her companion was doing well or not.
T'Pol seemed as imperturbable as ever as they discussed what to do next with Enodreiwn around the first meal. The Vulcan was still adamant they needed to leave the compound right away and Hoshi could see her point, however reluctantly. Even if Enoikoawn was trustworthy and came back with the documents he promised, there was still the possibility he might have been followed. Every single person that learned of their location multiplied the risk of them being discovered.
"Where will you go?" Enodreiwn was not keen on seeing the aliens leave, if only because they all had settled into a comfortable routine. She also worried about other Nints shooting them on sight.
"We need to go back to the delta." T'Pol replied.
Hoshi froze, looking at the Commander. A wave of anxiety washed over her and she felt she was going to be sick to her stomach. She felt herself flush, then blanch.
T'Pol looked at her impassively "I realize this is a source of emotional distress for you, Ensign, but Enoikoawn did mention that it took them a while to find us because they never thought we would have gone back to Nint territory. It will be an even more remote thought that we went back to the delta, especially after they destroyed all the camps."
"They destroyed all the camps?" Enodreiwn repeated, in surprise.
T'Pol turned to her "Yes. The planes that attacked the camps were not Arumid planes. The Arumids are a technology-indifferent species and do not have attack planes."
Enodreiwn had to nod in acknowledgement, as little as she liked the idea. "But how do you know they destroyed all of the camps?" she went on.
Hoshi gave T'Pol a meaningful look. While they had told Enodreiwn about the camps and the breeding program, they had not been quite as forthcoming about the objectives of the Nint government or about what happened to the Arumid women once they reached the water edge. Partly to protect their protector from a truth she would find distressful, and partly to protect her from knowledge that could expose her to risk in her personal life.
"Extrapolating from the actual density of twenty-six bodies per ten square meters when we were at the point where everyone was being herded to, and using a rough proxy of an area two thousand yards wide by one hundred yards deep, there would have been over five hundred thousand women marching together, which is more than the entire population of all the camps taken together." T'Pol usual overly-detailed answer once again proved very effective at making the listener give up on the question. Hoshi had to admit she was watching a master at work.
T'Pol's turned to Enodreiwn. "How far is the delta?"
Hoshi could still not believe she was serious about going there. The place had been blown to smithereens. They were there and they saw the barracks go into flames in the distance. And she had seriously bad memories associated with the place. At the same time, she had to admit the idea had merit. Who in their right mind would ever go back to the place they escaped from, and who would ever go find them there? Nobody, that's who.
"It's twenty or thirty miles down the hills, depending which canyon you go to" Enodreiwn replied. "But the entire area is off-limits, nobody has been allowed to go there in years."
"Do you have an old map of the delta area" T'Pol asked. Enodreiwn looked at her silently for several seconds, then seemed to resign herself to the inevitable and got up. They heard her forage in the common chamber and she came back with an old version of a litpadd. She handed it to T'Pol. "Here, this is from when I was young."
It didn't take long for them to identify a place that was within authorized space where the road branched off in three directions, all going down into the delta canyons. Enodreiwn readily accepted to fly them there. She wouldn't know where exactly they went, which gave her and them a measure of protection.
The hovercraft lifted off just as the suns started shining, the glare of the sun catching on the main visor panel, reflected in the ceramic discs covering the roofs of the compound.
X
Enodreiwn shut off the hovercraft engine as they reached the T formed by the intersection of the three roads, landing the vessel with a soft bump. They had all agreed that this was a temporary measure. They would stay away for five days, until Enoikoawn came back. If he had lied, Nint guards would show up within the next couple of days. If he had been followed, his followers would come to the compound the same day or right after. If everything went according to plan, they would come back to Enodreiwn's and work on the escape plan.
T'Pol didn't mention to Enodreiwn her compound would soon also be in the hair triggers of Starfleet and, if she knew Trip, Vulcan. Somehow that made her a little more confident in their chances.
"I will be back after sunset in exactly five days" Enodreiwn was repeating the Commander's instructions, committing them to memory. "I will flash the headlight twice so that you know it is me. Only twice. Anything else and you will not come out. If I flash twice, you will come out and I can fill you in on what happened. You can see if you can come back."
T'Pol had been acquiescing along as Enodreiwn went over the instructions. "That is correct" she confirmed.
"But what if one of us can't make the meeting?" Hoshi asked. "Shouldn't we have a fall-back plan?" Both Enodreiwn and T'Pol turned to look at her, then looked at each other. T'Pol nodded "The Ensign is right." Enodreiwn huffed, the answer was so simple "If you're not there or I'm not there, or anything happens, I'll come back the next day" she said as if it were obvious. "I'll keep coming back until we meet again."
Hoshi and T'Pol eyed her in silence. Hoshi couldn't quite believe that this woman who almost shot them, who wouldn't open her house except for the basement, would go out of her way to come wait for them. But then, she had seen stranger things. As if to give her thoughts even more credence, Enodreiwn reached out behind the driver's ledge, pulled out a heavy-looking garment. "Here, take my wrapcoat" she pushed the clothing at T'Pol, who was surprised into taking it, made to give it back. "No, no" Enodreiwn shook her mane "You are always cold, I see it."
And then they were out of the hovercraft and she was gone.
xx
Phlox looked up irritably at the interruption. He was never going to get the Dalgort Medical Exchange, the DME for short, started if people kept pulling him right and left to deal with topical issues. Fortunately, this time it was his friend, Dojtaorv the Verkael doctor, who walked in. Phlox got up from his drafting table, walked over to effusively shake hands.
"My dear Dojtaorv, I'm glad to be able to tell you things are proceeding very nicely, very nicely indeed." Phlox smile stretched from ear to ear. "If we keep going at this pace, well, I'll expect we'll have the new organization in place within a couple of months!" Phlox beamed again. They had just learned where T'Pol and Hoshi were , thanks to Trip. It would be a short matter to extract them, with four weeks or so to spare before their lives were in danger. That would be enough time. When he wasn't busy with the DME, he was studying Dalgort reproduction, trying to figure what could be done and when to do it, and he was quite certain there was the perfect solution somewhere out there waiting for him.
But Dojtaorv looked at him with something akin to chagrin, and Phlox noticed his mane was standing a little taller than usual. He stopped in his tracks, brow furrowing as his smile started vanishing "Is anything wrong? You seem under stress."
The Verkael doctor looked apologetic. Phlox knew that as much as Dojtaorv professed to despise everything political, he was still very much involved in all the behind-the-scenes happenings that characterized the kind of mission he had embarked upon.
"I just don't know quite how to tell you this-" the Verkael doctor started.
Phlox's heart fell "Something happen to the women?"
Dojtaorv realized where Phlox was headed, vehemently shook his head. "Not at all, not at all. We're still working as per the plan." As luck would have it, one of the Verkael agents on Nint had located the women the day before they had received the information from Starfleet.
"No," the doctor went on, "I am not sure how to tell you, but we have received a direct request for your services."
Phlox rolled his eyes. Direct request for his services was pretty much all he'd been dealing with since he had arrived on Dalgort. Sometimes he felt like setting up the DME was a side activity. He didn't see what was different with this one that Dojtaorv would be tied into knots about it. "Yes, well?" he prompted, bouncing on the balls of his feet.
Dojtaorv cringed and his yellow mane went up another couple of millimeters. "The request came from the Nint government."
The silence that fell on the room was so thick one could have heard a pin drop. Phlox froze in place, settled back into his heels. "No! There is absolutely no way I will help anyone in that government or on the Nint world. You can let them know right now and let me get back to the DME project." Phlox was furious that Dojtaorv would even ask, even if he understood the necessities of diplomacy.
"The Nint government is willing to help" Dojtaorv quickly spoke up before Phlox could box himself into a corner with any further declaration.
"They will hand T'Pol and Hoshi over and provide safe passage back from Nint, hmm?" Phlox prompted.
Dojtaorv's mane crept up still a little higher, the equivalent of a deep blush. "They're not able to do that because the diverse factions within the government are not in agreement. But we should be able to get some benefits as long as they're not public or visible."
Phlox's glare could have cut through metal, and it seemed to cut through Dojtaorv, who visibly deflated. But the Verkael was too much of a diplomat to consider that was a loss. It was just an opening move.
xx
They had been walking down the center road for three hours and all of a sudden Hoshi recognized the surrounding hills, the canyon, the white road. She knew where they were. Trust the Vulcan to have gone back to the exact same camp they had been held in, probably had the whole thing on a map somewhere in her head. It felt surreal to be walking there, her whole being was screaming at her to get away, turn around, she shouldn't be there. She saw the squat building and stopped in surprise. T'Pol had been walking ahead but felt the sudden change in their rhythm and stopped a few yards away. Hoshi was looking at the expanse of the canyon, empty except for the shells of the burn-out buildings. "Why wasn't that building destroyed?" she asked, and at the same time realized she already knew the answer.
"The Nints were the ones attacking the camps" T'Pol replied. "They needed to destroy the barracks for evidence reasons, but they didn't want to destroy the headquarters. Not fully."
That was when it hit Hoshi that the whole thing had indeed been a set-up. As much as T'Pol had told her, and she believed it, it had not emotionally sunk it yet. Until that moment.
It took another quite a while longer before they were at the structure itself. The spiked fence had been blown apart, there were trenches in the ground where the light curtains had been removed. Hoshi was feeling more and more nervous as they approached the building, wondering how T'Pol could just walk up there like it was some goddam leisurely stroll.
As they got nearer, they could see that the building, while still standing, had been struck too. There were gaping holes where ordnance must have gone in and exploded, the part above the ground was useless as a shelter. T'Pol walked in as if to a well-known place. Hoshi saw her go to a wall, touch a panel in a series of rotating moves as flashing lights blinked back in acceptance, and all of sudden a recessed panel in the wall slid open and they were staring at a staircase going downstairs. T'Pol turned to Hoshi "Power cells" she said, as explanation for why the door systems still seemed to be working.
However reluctantly, Hoshi had to admit that T'Pol's plan was brilliant. The lower levels under the squat buildings would have been protected from the bombs and would still be accessible, and T'Pol had been working there for three long months. She knew exactly how they were set-up, how to turn the power generators back on or, worst case scenario, how to manually operate the complex. They would have protection, water, electricity, and if so access to a CPU, and all the equipment in the world they might need to get to Verkael. And possibly food supplies. If there were any the Commander would know where they were.
They kept going through the underground floors until they reached the computer room. The door was thrust open, nothing was blinking, there was no humming indicating the central processing unit was working. T'Pol went to a large bank of machines in the center of the room, hit a couple of switches, stopped, her hands on each side of the array. "The core processing unit has been stripped away" she sighed, obviously disappointed. She collected herself, turned to Hoshi, pushing herself off the machine "We need to set up a living area for our needs".
They retraced their steps through the empty rooms and corridors. Hoshi was feeling increasingly nervous. The place was spooky enough empty of any living soul, the fact that it was the camp where they were held made it nightmarishly so. Her misgivings seemed to be echoed in T'Pol's step. She could tell her walk had slowed as they passed by non-descript doors, obviously non-medical, probably cells or something similar that must tie back to unpleasant memories.
"It's okay" she said to her companion.
"Of course, Ensign" T'Pol replied, getting back to normal speed. In her back, Hoshi mimicked 'of course, Ensign', rolling her eyes. Gosh, the Vulcan was infuriating.