A/N: Welcome back and thanks for the support! The gang's back together, at least temporarily.

See the first chapter for content disclaimers.

Let Me Take You Out

Chapter Seven

Before any of them had the chance to react, Malcolm had stalked across the room, thrown open the hatch, and stepped to one side, welcoming Sub-Commander T'Pol into their makeshift surgical suite.

True to form, she was entirely unbothered, even reaching out to push the barrel of his weapon away from her. She appeared a little disheveled, self-conscious even, her lips swollen and bruised from some kind of impact. Each of them managed to put two and two together, given what Nallim had told them about the love potion, and eagerly resolved not to mention it, if only to save their commanding officers the embarrassment.

The ruling couple's son was balanced on her hip with both faces buried in her shoulder, his little tunic stained with what appeared to be splatters of blood. Even from a distance, Liz could tell that he was exhausted and terrified from whatever untold horrors he'd seen, and though it would mean she would have to don a fresh sterile gown, she immediately went to take him in her arms, resting her tricorder in the opposite hand.

But the boy refused even the most cursory scans, crying out and gripping T'Pol's uniform even harder. He was shaking violently now, so much so that she was instantly fearful he would accidentally hurt himself. Everything she was doing to calm him down didn't seem to be working; nevertheless, they all needed him to be quiet, lest they be discovered before they could bring his father back from the dead.

It was then T'Pol noticed that Nallim was lifelessly laid out on a gurney in the middle of the room, and it all seemed to click for her. She reached up to cover the little one's eyes, if only to shield him from the inevitable.

"I'm sure he's already scarred for life," Liz murmured to no one in particular, casting a wary glance towards Phlox. Eyes downcast, he nodded, and she quickly went to prepare a sedation hypospray, consciously not putting too much thought into where exactly her own humanity had gone over the past ten months.

By contrast, Malcolm was as intense as ever, laser-focused on the task at hand. "Ma'am, we were just about to go searching for Veela."

Something shifted in her expression then, something indecipherable, and then she moved further into the room, followed closely by the captain, who was cradling something very blonde and very bloody in his arms.

"Don't bother," he said quietly, making a beeline to Hoshi. As he passed by Liz, she reached up to cover her mouth with her hand, desperately willing her last meal to stay down where it belonged. The sight of a severed head - so often confined to haunted houses and horror movies back home - was almost too much to take, but Archer seemed curiously numb to it all. "Here's your bobby pins."

Hoshi accepted his gift, then closed her hands so tightly that Liz was sure she'd punctured the skin. She was starting to regain a little color in her cheeks, but she still appeared unsteady, as though she was liable to faint at any second. Still, they had a job to do, and they had to see this to the end, whether or not the body count had just doubled in the blink of an eye.

"I wasn't sure if you'd see them."

"We followed them all the way from the second floor, down the stairs, and straight here." Wordlessly, Jon made his way over to the operating table, laying what remained of the dead man's wife right next to his ear. "You're lucky someone else didn't find it."

"Luckier than her," Phlox mumbled absently, taking over to make sure the head remained balanced. He turned it this way and that, examining the plane of incision and the jagged cut encircling her neck, then took the time to close her eyelids, changing her expression from pure, mortal terror to the facsimile of peace.

"Should start looking for next of kin?" It was a question, not a comment, and Hoshi almost hesitated to say it, given the little boy (whose name was still unknown to them) was hanging on every word. The original plan was to provide a distraction so that Veela and her son could escape into the night and dodge the intended hit on their lives, but if their time in deep space had taught them anything, it was to expect the unexpected.

"Not so fast," Phlox cautioned. "She might still be alive."

Archer gestured to the direct evidence to the contrary, then to himself, as if to remind him that if any of them got their heads chopped off, there would certainly be no hope. He was exasperated, as though he were ready for the whole thing to be over, but Liz had the feeling that had to do with the lingering awkwardness between him and the Sub-Commander more than anything.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.

"Each B'Saari has a redundant nervous system, and can survive up to a day with only one brain. Reattaching this head may be beyond my personal capabilities in this facility, but…"

"Are you saying she still might be hidden somewhere?" Malcolm interjected, scrambling for his scanner. Suddenly the hunt was back on, and he was flush with the need to jump self-sacrificially into the fray, totally and completely.

"If so, Veela is likely disoriented and unable to move very fast." Phlox turned and indicated the closures at the back of his surgical gown, leaving many other assumptions about her safety left unsaid. Liz quickly obliged, trying not to think about how terrifying it would be to be trapped in one's body and unable to fight back while being tortured by dissidents who had crafted an elaborate stunt to get rid them, and had already been halfway successful. At some point, he leant back towards her, and she held his gloves at the ready, drawing the silvery material up and over the elbows. "Whatever the case may be, it's imperative that you find her first."

He need not say any more, as Malcolm was already on the move, making a broad circuit around the room and gathering anything that might be useful as a weapon. In the corner, he found a coat with a voluminous hood and drew it on over his shoulders, with the mind to cover his uniform and singular head from any curious partygoers. Doubtless their absence had already been noticed, and she wasn't looking forward to facing an entire room full of people that wanted them dead.

"Why do you think she left the baby behind?" Hoshi's question struck them all as significant, because none of them had an answer for her. In the moment, missing a major appendage and fleeing from assassins, Liz had a feeling that survival and self-preservation were at the forefront of Veela's mind, and almost nothing else.

Malcolm obviously didn't want to dwell on it too long. He was halfway to the door before he even glanced back at them, asking somewhat sheepishly: "Would any of you care to come with me?"

"I will," Archer and T'Pol answered simultaneously, then met the other's gaze, exchanging a reproachful glare. Their tactical officer had almost circumvented them altogether to give himself marching orders, and both felt the need to impart their approval, considering they had run off to share a private moment right before everything hit the fan. They seemed to have a conversation without words then, before Jonathan intervened, charging towards the door before she could get another word in edgewise.

God, if the lower decks contingent got even a hint of what had transpired in the past few hours, the rumor mill would have enough material for the next few months. The entire situation was heedlessly messy, and Liz could only hope that it wasn't about to get a whole lot worse.

Once Malcolm and Jon were gone, the minutes flew by. Hoshi posted up across the room with her back pressed against the door as she toiled away on the UT. For the sake of the mission, they would not only need to spoof Nallim's voice, but deliver a convincing and long-winded enough speech to allow the baby and quite possibly Veela for escape. When they had first entered the palace, the lobby had been full of protestors, and Hoshi wasn't entirely sure how they would pull off such a miracle.

One step at a time.

T'Pol was seated about as far away from the operating table as she could possibly get, surrounded by landscaping tools and cartons of nonperishables, but Liz could still feel her eyes boring a hole into her forehead, searching for reassurance. She looked for all the world as though she were working her way through the personal quandary of a lifetime, but was trapped somewhere between the spectacle of seeing the prime minister's brain rearranged and keeping his son calm, which was growing more and more difficult by the second.

"Time check."

Hoshi didn't even look up from her screen. "Twenty minutes."

Surely they would have heard from Archer and Reed by now. If Liz didn't already have her hands occupied by using the clamps to hold down a major artery, she would have woven her fingers through her hair and screamed. They still had so much to do - the man's heart wasn't even pumping yet - and every time she glanced up at Phlox, a new bead of sweat had formed on his brow, conveying that he knew it as well.

He was usually her anchor, her persistent source calm on a vessel that was constantly running into life-threatening misadventure. This was quite literally light years away from what she expected from her time on the Enterprise, and that thought was irreverently amusing to her.

"Phlox, the next time we're in comm range of the Interspecies Medical Exchange, we ought to ask about getting you a proper nurse."

The doctor smiled at that, but didn't look away from his instruments, gingerly inserting the cerebellar implant through the incision at the base of the man's skull. Any moment now, they would start to see brain activity. Any moment now.

"Hmm. I'm not convinced you mean that."

He knew, because of course he knew, that she felt more alive these days than ever before. Something about moonlighting as a field medic and keeping the company of the most fascinating, extraordinary man she'd ever met had fundamentally changed who she was as a person, and though missions like these terrified her to no end, she wouldn't have it any other way.

That was when they heard it.

It started out as a pair of turbolift doors opening down the hall, then several pairs of heavy boots on the concrete floor. Chatter in the B'Saari language reached them from a distance, and Hoshi looked up, her eyes impossibly wide with terror.

By the time they got into UT range, Liz realized that her worst fears were confirmed.

"They're definitely in here." One of them was saying, reaching for the latch, only to find it locked. "Give me your blaster."

That was it. They were all on their feet at once, and rather than conceal the obvious, the two of them seized the IV poles and the edge of the gurney, unlocking the wheels and pushing the entire surgical assembly into the adjoining room, hot on the trail of T'Pol and Hoshi.

The basement was expansive, with plenty of places to hide - coupled with the fact that there was another external entrance somewhere, Liz was almost certain they could evade the insurrectionists for long enough to shoot a message Malcolm's way. Their XO was clearly thinking similarly; rocking the baby to keep him quiet, she gestured towards the open door of another closet and started to lead the way, dodging rows of cargo containers at every turn.

They were almost completely out of sight before Liz realized that they had left Veela's head sitting on a side table wrapped in gauze, and knew it wouldn't take a genius to figure out what was going on if their prize was discovered.

Phlox took a wild swing at her as she hurried away, but came up a fraction of a centimeter short of her retreating back. The impact jostled Nallim, made the cardio stimulator go flying, and caused a frantic cascade of movement as his companions had to use their combined strength to drag him into the closet, cursing up a blue streak in Denobulan all the way.

Liz had just managed to tuck the severed head under her arm when the latch in the door behind her came loose, having been blown to high heaven by a weapons discharge. Desperately, she looked around for a worthwhile hiding spot, knowing full well that her life depended on her choice.

When the dissidents at long last forced themselves into the basement, the main chamber was dark and empty, with nary an object out of place except for a terrified woman hiding behind a nearby wooden crate, her ragged breath caustic in her throat.

(to be continued)