SEVEN


Hoshi pressed her cheek to the cold metal and thanked whatever drifting non-corporeal entities stupid enough to be in the neighbourhood that she didn't have T'Pol's conspicuous appendages. That Vulcan would have had serious problems lying in this airvent on her chest.

She wrestled with a snigger, biting on the side of her hand in desperation until she left a half-moon of tiny indentations in the flesh. There was nothing to laugh at, but hysteria had been wending its way through her insidiously for some hours now like a dark wind breathing a stench of decay, and she didn't know how to keep excorcise it if not by laughing at nothing. Not now. Pull yourself together, sweetheart. Don't laugh now.

In the room below her the bunk creaked as he lay back, clearly with his boots still on - something her own Malcolm would never have done - and she sucked in her breath as hard as she could. The soft moan of springs abated after a moment, and if she strained herself to an unprecedented level, her ear pressed firmly to the grating until a pattern of criss-cross marks like a burnt waffle was branded into her cheek, she could just distinguish the pale sound of his breathing. She prayed he wouldn't hear hers. His ears had always been good, but hers were better, and she could barely make him out.

There was a catch in his breath like a broken shutter rattling in the wind, a catch she didn't much like, and the suspicion she had flirted with beat its way back to the surface at the sound. He was in pain and doing his best to conceal it, even here where no-one would hear him, something once again unlike her expectations - her husband could be stupidly brave, even reckless, but boy could he whine about it afterwards. Not with everybody, not in the presence of the crew that ultimately looked to him to be the model officer and the epitome of restraint, but with those he trusted, like her, he often gave vent to it in very colourful and unintentionally hilarious ways. And at times, rare, distressing times, in more emotional ones. Not so the man lying motionless down in that room now. There was a faint whimper, quickly stifled, and then a deeper silence. The ultimate stiff upper lip.

His arm had been busted up in the scuffle, but not too severely; the bleeding had stopped on the shuttlepod and there had been no swelling and little bruising. She had been flying the shuttlepod and had allowed the captain and their house guest to take care of the wound, but investigation had shown no broken bones, no torn ligaments. No, something other than that injury was the cause, something fresher and unknown to her . . . something that had happened since they arrived back on board under those bizarre circumstances.

She swallowed back the vinegar-water taste in her mouth, face-to-face with the only conclusion that fit. After all, only one person knew he was here besides her. Only one person could have been in this room with him.

(Don't be alone with him, even for a moment. It's not safe.)

She was a nanosecond away from sliding down out of her hiding place and confronting him with it when the door swooped open, flooding watery puddles of light onto the deck below her, and somebody entered the room. Hoshi scurried backwards from the grating hastily and lay stupefied and still in the vent, listening to everything that went on below - but blind to it. Her stomach churned with the possibilities, barbed wire wrapped around her most important organs. Who was she frightened for? The captain? Herself, even though they didn't know she was here?

She couldn't fool herself as she might like on that one.

"Lights," the newcomer commanded softly. They came on without warning and shone into the vent in upward-lit checkers through the grating, making her blink. She knew the man's voice - it was Captain Archer.

"I really must learn how you do that," she heard Malcolm mutter; half-asleep, half-sarcastic, completely defiant. The bunk groaned as he straightened and she thought he must have stood - the springs fell ominously silent after that. She lay still where she was in the vent, wanting to crawl closer and peek, knowing it wasn't safe.

"Not lost the sense of humour, I see. Never mind. I guess I'll learn to live with it, if you don't die of it."

There was a rueful quality to Malcolm's voice as he replied to this, still meek, still almost emotive in his tone. "Is that a threat, or an example of your sense of humour?"

"You're not laughing."

"Neither are you."

There was a standoff at this, both silent, and Hoshi resisted the urge to squirm, galled at her inability to see them. Something was wrong about this; it was as if these two knew each other. There was history fused not into the words, but into the spaces between them. Each full stop was a bullet hole and each question mark a hangman's noose.

"I didn't come here to play games, Mr. Reed. The truth is I didn't expect you, and now I don't know what to do with you. I don't suppose there's any question of dressing you up as your double indefinitely; not with those eyes."

"You wouldn't risk it anyway."

"You're right. I wouldn't."

"You don't trust me."

"It's a bit late to be coy, don't you think? Besides; we weren't alone down there."

Hoshi bit her lip - hard - to keep back a sound. What sound, she didn't know.

(Don't be alone with him. It's not safe.)

"Hoshi?" There was a slight rise in Malcolm's voice, a hitch almost, but negligible. "Hoshi's a child. She doesn't know what's going on."

She almost tore from her hiding place at that, without a moment's thought, too indignant even to speak. How dare he? But the question the captain asked next knocked that thought right out of her mind. Intrigued, confused, and downright terrified, she sank meekly back against the metal, pipes in her back and light in her eyes, and paid attention.

"What happened to the other one? She went missing the same time as you. To be honest, we were convinced you were both dead."

"You were half right," Malcolm responded, carefully. "It's a good job for me that Trip didn't give up on us as easily as you did. He never believed we were dead."

There was a hearty, gut-deep roar of laughter from Archer. Hoshi could only listen, helpless to understand what her ears told her; unable to move, but boiling like a storm-torn sea inside. "Is that how you escaped? Trip? Looks like the engineer that's never in engineering finally did something right."

"And someone else. Someone a little closer to your heart, if not to your way of thinking."

Archer's voice dropped to somewhere below absolute zero. It could freeze lava in a heartbeat and crack hearts in less. Hoshi shivered. "Him," he said.

"Who else? I hate to resort to such an old cliché, but he's twice the man you are."

"Actually . . . he's exactly half. Or one and the same. It's all apples and oranges, Lieutenant."

Malcolm's voice deadened as Archer's had done, descending to an unshakeable whisper. It barely concealed the quivering heat rising from his every syllable like steam. "I don't hold that rank anymore."

"Finally promoted you, did they? Well, it's not as if you didn't work for it."

"Starfleet fell, Captain. It's gone, finished. Everything your father worked for - it's over. There's not an NX-class ship left in known space; the Enterprise is . . ."

There was a clang that reverberated through the room's flimsy walls and buffeted waves of vibration through the vent where she lay. The arching tubular space snatched up the noise and sent it roaring and echoing around her like the bells of Notre Dame. She tuned her ears downward as the aftershocks abated, knowing that one of two things had happened, and unable to see which. There was no sound from either of them, no way of knowing who had attacked whom, though she could guess. Archer was the next to speak, angrily, and she knew then it was he that had rammed into Malcolm. Was this the first time, she wondered, sickly. "You're lying! They told me . . ."

The most wicked of Malcolm's eclectic laughs spilled into the last echoes of angered metal, and Hoshi shuddered involuntarily, the barbed wire tightening into her heart and liver like a fist. Gooseflesh rose along her cold arms and the chill draft of air rattling through this network of tunnels brushed against her face like silk. He and her darling ambitious lieutenant were so much alike, in some ways, and that deliciously knowing chuckle was perhaps the most alike of all. "What?" he said, scornfully. "And you believed them? After what they've done? I always thought you were naive, sir . . . but I never thought you were stupid."

There was the sound of bone striking bone, and a dull thunk as Malcolm was driven to the deck, and was silent. He made no discernible sound either of pain or surprise, not even under his breath. She could understand that, she thought, as perverse as it was in its way; the satisfaction of any attack came from seeing its victim react. "How would you like to go back to them, Malcolm? It can be arranged, even here. I don't know what they did to you . . . but I can see from your face it wasn't pleasant."

Hoshi crammed her knuckles in her mouth and bit down on them till her teeth were numb. She had almost allowed a shocked, unwilling little cry to slip out, and she mustn't allow that, she mustn't be found. Not by the man she had been calling 'Captain' for these past months. Whatever had taken place on Tut, she had been the sole witness - and both men knew it.

"So what are you going to do with me?" forced a breathless Malcolm, with the scrabbling, dragging sounds that meant he was making himself stand. "You can't exactly let them take me anywhere from here, not from the Enterprise itself - that would only make fingers point at you."

"No," Archer agreed, tightly. "But I can get you off this ship legitimately and let them take it from there."

"And in the meantime?"

"I'm not too concerned. After all, nobody knows you're here . . . do they? I've disconnected the sensors to this room, and Trip thinks it's a glitch." He chuckled, entirely without mirth. "That should keep him busy for a day or two, at least. It would usually be my armoury officer's job, of course, but he's indisposed due to his little allergy attack down on the planet. All that pollen."

The words tangled in Hoshi's mind like brambles in a hedgerow, and although she tore at them and twisted them all she got for her trouble was a series of runic scratches. Them. She ran cold instinctively at the tone both men used, one an undercurrent of unadulterated dread, the other one of distrustful reverence. Them. Somebody both men knew.

(After all, nobody knows you're here)

Except me, she thought, and swallowed. Nobody knows he's here but me.

"How?" Malcolm murmured, barely loud enough for her to hear. "How can the two of you be so different?"

"Apples and oranges, Mr. Reed. Apples and oranges."

There was the clump of heavy boots on metal, the swish of the doors opening and closing, then silence. Below, the lights quietly clicked off.