Disclaimer: Enterprise and all related characters belong to someone else.
Yippee.
**********************
MIND AND BODY
Chapter 4: Insinuation
**********************
Reed's mind refused to give him any peace that night. Thoughts of the decrepit alien ship, now many light-years behind them, fluttered around his mind. He dozed, not quite asleep and not quite awake, dreams of the wind and rain battering at the bulkheads and the vines growing up and up. He saw himself prone on the floor, skin and hair rotting, shrinking around his bones and finally rotting away altogether.
The silver walls kept him confined, kept him absolutely motionless.... he knew he was alive and aware, but still he drifted in and out, time passing him by in great chunks. Sometimes it moved so slowly that he could see the vines themselves growing up and over the crumbling consoles, and sometimes decades passed in an instant, so that he awoke once more and saw the seasons and the forest changed entirely.
And then something new, someone new---someone touching the thought-saver, speaking, but he could not answer.... Reed bolted awake in a cold sweat, his blankets twisted around his legs and his pillow crushed against the wall. "Too much time with Jolas," he whispered, mouth dry. He flipped the lights on, looking at the clock. Only a few hours until he was due for a shift---he might as well get up anyway.
Standing in the shower, face lifted to the steaming water, he heard the comm beep loudly. Cursing, he fumbled for a towel, couldn't find one, and simply ran towards the wall unit. Bless the person who didn't include video on this comm, he said silently and pressed the button. "Reed here."
"Sorry to wake you, Lieutenant, but I need you to report to Sub-commander T'Pol's quarters right away," came the captain's voice, gravelly over the intercom.
"Aye, sir. I'll be there in a few minutes. Reed out."
What in bloody blazes could the captain need him for in T'Pol's quarters this time of night? Quickly Reed dried off and pulled on a T-shirt and sweatpants, deciding that the summons sounded too urgent to bother with his entire uniform. He jogged through the halls, running a hand quickly through his wet hair to straighten it and got the opposite effect since it simply stuck up on end.
The captain, in pajamas himself, was standing with the fourth shift security crewman outside T'Pol's quarters, speaking in low, urgent tones. Archer glanced up as he heard Reed's bare feet padding against the deck plating.
"You didn't need to take a shower, Lieutenant," said the captain, looking slightly puzzled.
"Er, you called when I was in the middle of one, sir," Reed replied, flustered. "What's the problem?"
"About twenty minutes ago, Sub-commander T'Pol summoned security to her quarters, claiming an intruder alert," said Crewman Philips. "She sounded rather agitated. Or very agitated, considering she's Vulcan," he added in an undertone.
"Intruder alert? Did you find anyone?" Reed said, staring at T'Pol's open door.
"No, sir," said Philips. "We arrived and the Sub-commander was unconscious on the floor. There were no signs of a struggle and no visible injuries. She was simply.... unconscious. She wasn't even splayed out or anything, just lying there completely straight."
Reed stepped into the room, flicking the dimmed lights to normal ambience. Vulcan candles, some ceremonial decorations on the walls, nothing askew or out-of-place as far as he could tell. The sheets on the bed, wrinkled as if T'Pol had thrown them aside, were the only things not neatly in their place. "No sign of anything happening. Is T'Pol in Sickbay?"
"Phlox is examining her now," said Archer, stepping into the room beside him.
"I want to check the recordings of the transmission," Reed said, crossing the room to T'Pol's computer interface. Quickly he pulled up the intership logs, glad that he had managed to convince the captain to allow him to temporarily record all communications in case of emergency. It had taken several weeks into the Expanse, added with Reed's continual reminders of the various Suliban attacks, to bring Archer around to the idea.
"T'Pol to Security," came the Vulcan's voice over the speakers. Philips was right; she did sound rather agitated. Still firm and commanding, her tone nonetheless held none of the usual cool reserve. Urgency---and fear?--- colored her words. Reed did not like it one bit. "Intruder alert. Security to my quarters immediately---" It cut off without warning and Reed tapped at the computer for an instant, wondering where the rest of the message was, before he realized T'Pol herself had been cut off. He wished he had been able to convince the captain of the necessity of installing recording cameras in all quarters, but so far Archer had blatantly refused.
The captain, arms crossed over his chest, was staring at the walls as if he expected some mysterious alien to come leaping out of them. "Could this have anything to do with your visitor in the armory, Lieutenant?" said Archer.
Reed had not considered this possibility. He thought for a moment, but shook his head. "He can't actually interact with anything," Reed said. "He's an intangible hologram. I don't know how he would have even gotten to her quarters. Someone has to carry the thought-saver for him to move around at all."
"Well, just a possibility. They didn't hit it off well," said Archer slowly.
"No, they didn't, but I don't know how he would have done something like this."
"Well, see if you can find anything," said Archer. "I'm going to Sickbay. I'll see if Phlox can wake her up, or tell us any clues that might enlighten this little mystery." His words, casual though they were, still held a great deal of concern. Reed nodded to his captain as Archer strode out of the room, and then beckoned Philips over.
"Let's get to work," he told the crewman, although Reed had to admit, he had no idea where to start. Invisible intruders, unconscious Vulcans---it didn't sit right with him.
Not right at all.
***********************
Hoshi idly twisted a hair tie around her fingers, listening to the quiet snap. The science station stood conspicuously empty to her right; across the bridge, the armory station was also unoccupied. Mayweather sat at the pilot's station, but had abandoned any pretense of interest in his work, leaning his head on one elbow and making minute course corrections with the other every quarter of an hour or so.
Archer had been in and out of the bridge all morning, as had Reed and Trip, but none of them stayed for very long. T'Pol, of course, was still in Sickbay, not having woken up yet. Hoshi had heard the captain's brief report to the entire ship just as she'd gotten out of bed that morning and didn't like it one bit.
Mysterious intruders that no one could find---Hoshi did not like intruders even when they were nicely tangible and easily located. The hair tie in her fingers suddenly snapped and flew across the bridge, hitting the unsuspecting Mayweather right in the ear. Startled, he leapt up and glared around. "What the hell was that?" he said, and then obviously remembered where he was and sat down with a reddening face. The security crewman at tactical snickered.
"Sorry," said Hoshi meekly. "Bored."
"You've been hanging around the Lieutenant too much, if you think shooting people with things is a good boredom reliever," Travis retorted.
"No, I was playing with it because I was bored and I snapped it by accident," Hoshi told him. The ensign nodded back at her, apparently mollified.
"Freaky stuff going on around here," he said.
"Yeah," Hoshi agreed. They fell silent again for a few moments, neither knowing quite how to address the situation. Hoshi sighed and stared at the stars streaking across the view screen until the incoming transmission alert began to blink on her console.
Expecting a Starfleet command call, or something else equally routine, she was quite surprised to find a golden-skinned Halparen on the screen. The communication was prerecorded, but they had obviously responded to the message that she had been sending out since yesterday.
She saved the message and ran it through the UT, checking the automatic outgoing message while she waited for the new one to translate. Hoshi got another surprise when she discovered that not only was her original message no longer transmitting, it was not even in the database any longer. "Weird," she muttered. The console beeped.
Quickly she read over the new message, furrowing her brow in confusion. "What's the matter?" Travis asked, startling her.
"I think I need to talk to the captain," said Hoshi.
"Bad news?"
"Uh.... you could say that. It's about that alien that Malcolm found." Hoshi scrabbled around her station for a padd to copy the message. Mayweather watched her with a concerned look on his face. When she stopped dead with the padd in her hands, staring at her console with a look of utter bemusement, he stood up in a hurry.
"It's gone!" Hoshi said.
"What?"
"The message.... It's totally erased from the database!"
"How does that happen?"
"It doesn't!" cried Hoshi. "It was right here!"
"Well, maybe you've been sitting here for too long, Hoshi," said Mayweather kindly. "You looked like you were nodding off for a while there...." She glared at him; he put up his hands in defense. "Well, maybe you should take a break."
Hoshi glared at him again, but nodded. "Maybe I should," she said, stepping up from her station and coming down to stand next to him. "Travis, where are we going?" she said, staring at the helm in confusion.
He threw her a puzzled look, but took his station again. "Bearing for sector eight-two-mark seven," he said. "That supply station that's supposedly used by a lot of Xindi. Just like the captain ordered."
"Just wondered," said Hoshi, backing away from the helm and practically running for the doors, ignoring the looks that Mayweather and the armory crewman gave her. She had to find Malcolm.
Something very, very strange was going on here, she knew. Two messages disappearing, and Mayweather's heading coordinates---though he had been looking right at them, the coordinates displayed on the console were in almost the opposite direction and most definitely NOT the ones that he had read off to her.
And Jolas was.... Hoshi stopped in the corridor. What was the matter with Jolas? The message said---the message.... She shook her head violently, trying to dispel the sudden fuzziness. Jolas---well, she couldn't remember right now, but something was wrong about Jolas. The message had warned them- --the Halparens had said---what? She swore out loud and smacked the wall with her fist. Better not say anything until she remembered, Hoshi decided. Those coordinates, now.... that was a completely different matter. She knew she had seen THOSE.
She found Reed in the armory, reading a padd with a furrowed expression on his face. The thought-saver lay near the console. Hoshi did a double take when she looked at it; a mass of slender silver wires protruded from it, reaching up to the computer controls and right into the circuits. She glanced quickly at Reed, wondering why he was allowing this, but when she looked back at the thought-saver the wires had disappeared.
"Ensign?" Reed said, standing up. Hoshi gazed at the thought-saver for a moment longer and couldn't figure out why she felt so alarmed. Something was wrong, but she couldn't think what it was. With an effort she brought her thoughts back to the coordinates she had seen on Travis' station.
"I need to talk to you," said Hoshi quietly, casting an apprehensive look at the little silver box. Again she had a fleeting impression of something not quite right about it, but she couldn't put her finger on it.
"If this is about skulls again....," said Reed in exasperation.
"No. It's not," Hoshi said. "And actually, I would appreciate if we went somewhere other than the armory to talk about this." She meant, somewhere else than the thought-saver, but realized too late how it sounded.
"Er....all right," Reed said, putting the padd down. Hoshi led him out of the armory to one of the workstations in the corridors.
"Okay," she said. "Now access helm info. What is our heading?"
"Eight-two-mark seven," said Reed. "Why?"
Hoshi stared at him. "It's right there," she said. "We're going in a completely different direction! Look!" She pushed him out of the way and reloaded the helm information. There were the coordinates---
"Hoshi?" said Reed, and she started, realizing suddenly that she had been staring blankly into space. She looked down at the console and wondered why she had thought they were wrong. Eight-two-mark-seven, there it was, right there. "Are you all right?" Reed said, taking her hands gently in his own.
"I---I thought we were going the other way," said Hoshi. She remembered thinking it, but she couldn't remember why.
"Are you sure you're all right? I can take you to Sickbay."
"No.... I'm okay," she said, brushing him off. "I guess I haven't been getting enough sleep, or something. I think maybe I should get back to the bridge now." Still uneasy, but not sure why, she nodded to Reed and headed back towards the bridge.
*********************
Reed stood in the corridor and watched her go, musing that he would never, ever understand women, Hoshi in particular. He looked at the helm info on the computer console again, shut off the station, and headed back to the armory and his update of the targeting systems. Looking at the little silver box, he tapped on the top of it and smiled in greeting as the golden alien whooshed into being.
"Good day, Lieutenant Reed," said Jolas pleasantly. "How are you doing today?"
"Having a fairly uneventful one, actually," said Reed. "Other than Sub- Commander T'Pol getting mysteriously ill, nothing has really happened."
"The Sub-commander is ill? A pity," said Jolas. "What is the problem?"
"Well, the doctor is trying to figure it out," said Reed. "She collapsed. She was unconscious.... they found her this morning." Something niggled at the back of his mind, his instincts telling him that something sounded wrong about that, but he couldn't focus the thought. "No one else has been affected."
"How very curious," said Jolas, shaking his head. "If you see her, please give her my well-wishes."
"I'll do that," said Reed. He went back to working on the targeting scanners, chatting idly with Jolas about the weapons systems on the alien's ship and the Xindi, who Jolas remembered from his own time. After a while the lingering sensation that something was awry dissipated and he gave it no further thought.
Really, it was quite an uneventful day.
*******************
Ah, I love lazy Sunday afternoons and no school on Monday. Thank Martin Luther King, Jr. that you're getting this chapter! Leave one!
**********************
MIND AND BODY
Chapter 4: Insinuation
**********************
Reed's mind refused to give him any peace that night. Thoughts of the decrepit alien ship, now many light-years behind them, fluttered around his mind. He dozed, not quite asleep and not quite awake, dreams of the wind and rain battering at the bulkheads and the vines growing up and up. He saw himself prone on the floor, skin and hair rotting, shrinking around his bones and finally rotting away altogether.
The silver walls kept him confined, kept him absolutely motionless.... he knew he was alive and aware, but still he drifted in and out, time passing him by in great chunks. Sometimes it moved so slowly that he could see the vines themselves growing up and over the crumbling consoles, and sometimes decades passed in an instant, so that he awoke once more and saw the seasons and the forest changed entirely.
And then something new, someone new---someone touching the thought-saver, speaking, but he could not answer.... Reed bolted awake in a cold sweat, his blankets twisted around his legs and his pillow crushed against the wall. "Too much time with Jolas," he whispered, mouth dry. He flipped the lights on, looking at the clock. Only a few hours until he was due for a shift---he might as well get up anyway.
Standing in the shower, face lifted to the steaming water, he heard the comm beep loudly. Cursing, he fumbled for a towel, couldn't find one, and simply ran towards the wall unit. Bless the person who didn't include video on this comm, he said silently and pressed the button. "Reed here."
"Sorry to wake you, Lieutenant, but I need you to report to Sub-commander T'Pol's quarters right away," came the captain's voice, gravelly over the intercom.
"Aye, sir. I'll be there in a few minutes. Reed out."
What in bloody blazes could the captain need him for in T'Pol's quarters this time of night? Quickly Reed dried off and pulled on a T-shirt and sweatpants, deciding that the summons sounded too urgent to bother with his entire uniform. He jogged through the halls, running a hand quickly through his wet hair to straighten it and got the opposite effect since it simply stuck up on end.
The captain, in pajamas himself, was standing with the fourth shift security crewman outside T'Pol's quarters, speaking in low, urgent tones. Archer glanced up as he heard Reed's bare feet padding against the deck plating.
"You didn't need to take a shower, Lieutenant," said the captain, looking slightly puzzled.
"Er, you called when I was in the middle of one, sir," Reed replied, flustered. "What's the problem?"
"About twenty minutes ago, Sub-commander T'Pol summoned security to her quarters, claiming an intruder alert," said Crewman Philips. "She sounded rather agitated. Or very agitated, considering she's Vulcan," he added in an undertone.
"Intruder alert? Did you find anyone?" Reed said, staring at T'Pol's open door.
"No, sir," said Philips. "We arrived and the Sub-commander was unconscious on the floor. There were no signs of a struggle and no visible injuries. She was simply.... unconscious. She wasn't even splayed out or anything, just lying there completely straight."
Reed stepped into the room, flicking the dimmed lights to normal ambience. Vulcan candles, some ceremonial decorations on the walls, nothing askew or out-of-place as far as he could tell. The sheets on the bed, wrinkled as if T'Pol had thrown them aside, were the only things not neatly in their place. "No sign of anything happening. Is T'Pol in Sickbay?"
"Phlox is examining her now," said Archer, stepping into the room beside him.
"I want to check the recordings of the transmission," Reed said, crossing the room to T'Pol's computer interface. Quickly he pulled up the intership logs, glad that he had managed to convince the captain to allow him to temporarily record all communications in case of emergency. It had taken several weeks into the Expanse, added with Reed's continual reminders of the various Suliban attacks, to bring Archer around to the idea.
"T'Pol to Security," came the Vulcan's voice over the speakers. Philips was right; she did sound rather agitated. Still firm and commanding, her tone nonetheless held none of the usual cool reserve. Urgency---and fear?--- colored her words. Reed did not like it one bit. "Intruder alert. Security to my quarters immediately---" It cut off without warning and Reed tapped at the computer for an instant, wondering where the rest of the message was, before he realized T'Pol herself had been cut off. He wished he had been able to convince the captain of the necessity of installing recording cameras in all quarters, but so far Archer had blatantly refused.
The captain, arms crossed over his chest, was staring at the walls as if he expected some mysterious alien to come leaping out of them. "Could this have anything to do with your visitor in the armory, Lieutenant?" said Archer.
Reed had not considered this possibility. He thought for a moment, but shook his head. "He can't actually interact with anything," Reed said. "He's an intangible hologram. I don't know how he would have even gotten to her quarters. Someone has to carry the thought-saver for him to move around at all."
"Well, just a possibility. They didn't hit it off well," said Archer slowly.
"No, they didn't, but I don't know how he would have done something like this."
"Well, see if you can find anything," said Archer. "I'm going to Sickbay. I'll see if Phlox can wake her up, or tell us any clues that might enlighten this little mystery." His words, casual though they were, still held a great deal of concern. Reed nodded to his captain as Archer strode out of the room, and then beckoned Philips over.
"Let's get to work," he told the crewman, although Reed had to admit, he had no idea where to start. Invisible intruders, unconscious Vulcans---it didn't sit right with him.
Not right at all.
***********************
Hoshi idly twisted a hair tie around her fingers, listening to the quiet snap. The science station stood conspicuously empty to her right; across the bridge, the armory station was also unoccupied. Mayweather sat at the pilot's station, but had abandoned any pretense of interest in his work, leaning his head on one elbow and making minute course corrections with the other every quarter of an hour or so.
Archer had been in and out of the bridge all morning, as had Reed and Trip, but none of them stayed for very long. T'Pol, of course, was still in Sickbay, not having woken up yet. Hoshi had heard the captain's brief report to the entire ship just as she'd gotten out of bed that morning and didn't like it one bit.
Mysterious intruders that no one could find---Hoshi did not like intruders even when they were nicely tangible and easily located. The hair tie in her fingers suddenly snapped and flew across the bridge, hitting the unsuspecting Mayweather right in the ear. Startled, he leapt up and glared around. "What the hell was that?" he said, and then obviously remembered where he was and sat down with a reddening face. The security crewman at tactical snickered.
"Sorry," said Hoshi meekly. "Bored."
"You've been hanging around the Lieutenant too much, if you think shooting people with things is a good boredom reliever," Travis retorted.
"No, I was playing with it because I was bored and I snapped it by accident," Hoshi told him. The ensign nodded back at her, apparently mollified.
"Freaky stuff going on around here," he said.
"Yeah," Hoshi agreed. They fell silent again for a few moments, neither knowing quite how to address the situation. Hoshi sighed and stared at the stars streaking across the view screen until the incoming transmission alert began to blink on her console.
Expecting a Starfleet command call, or something else equally routine, she was quite surprised to find a golden-skinned Halparen on the screen. The communication was prerecorded, but they had obviously responded to the message that she had been sending out since yesterday.
She saved the message and ran it through the UT, checking the automatic outgoing message while she waited for the new one to translate. Hoshi got another surprise when she discovered that not only was her original message no longer transmitting, it was not even in the database any longer. "Weird," she muttered. The console beeped.
Quickly she read over the new message, furrowing her brow in confusion. "What's the matter?" Travis asked, startling her.
"I think I need to talk to the captain," said Hoshi.
"Bad news?"
"Uh.... you could say that. It's about that alien that Malcolm found." Hoshi scrabbled around her station for a padd to copy the message. Mayweather watched her with a concerned look on his face. When she stopped dead with the padd in her hands, staring at her console with a look of utter bemusement, he stood up in a hurry.
"It's gone!" Hoshi said.
"What?"
"The message.... It's totally erased from the database!"
"How does that happen?"
"It doesn't!" cried Hoshi. "It was right here!"
"Well, maybe you've been sitting here for too long, Hoshi," said Mayweather kindly. "You looked like you were nodding off for a while there...." She glared at him; he put up his hands in defense. "Well, maybe you should take a break."
Hoshi glared at him again, but nodded. "Maybe I should," she said, stepping up from her station and coming down to stand next to him. "Travis, where are we going?" she said, staring at the helm in confusion.
He threw her a puzzled look, but took his station again. "Bearing for sector eight-two-mark seven," he said. "That supply station that's supposedly used by a lot of Xindi. Just like the captain ordered."
"Just wondered," said Hoshi, backing away from the helm and practically running for the doors, ignoring the looks that Mayweather and the armory crewman gave her. She had to find Malcolm.
Something very, very strange was going on here, she knew. Two messages disappearing, and Mayweather's heading coordinates---though he had been looking right at them, the coordinates displayed on the console were in almost the opposite direction and most definitely NOT the ones that he had read off to her.
And Jolas was.... Hoshi stopped in the corridor. What was the matter with Jolas? The message said---the message.... She shook her head violently, trying to dispel the sudden fuzziness. Jolas---well, she couldn't remember right now, but something was wrong about Jolas. The message had warned them- --the Halparens had said---what? She swore out loud and smacked the wall with her fist. Better not say anything until she remembered, Hoshi decided. Those coordinates, now.... that was a completely different matter. She knew she had seen THOSE.
She found Reed in the armory, reading a padd with a furrowed expression on his face. The thought-saver lay near the console. Hoshi did a double take when she looked at it; a mass of slender silver wires protruded from it, reaching up to the computer controls and right into the circuits. She glanced quickly at Reed, wondering why he was allowing this, but when she looked back at the thought-saver the wires had disappeared.
"Ensign?" Reed said, standing up. Hoshi gazed at the thought-saver for a moment longer and couldn't figure out why she felt so alarmed. Something was wrong, but she couldn't think what it was. With an effort she brought her thoughts back to the coordinates she had seen on Travis' station.
"I need to talk to you," said Hoshi quietly, casting an apprehensive look at the little silver box. Again she had a fleeting impression of something not quite right about it, but she couldn't put her finger on it.
"If this is about skulls again....," said Reed in exasperation.
"No. It's not," Hoshi said. "And actually, I would appreciate if we went somewhere other than the armory to talk about this." She meant, somewhere else than the thought-saver, but realized too late how it sounded.
"Er....all right," Reed said, putting the padd down. Hoshi led him out of the armory to one of the workstations in the corridors.
"Okay," she said. "Now access helm info. What is our heading?"
"Eight-two-mark seven," said Reed. "Why?"
Hoshi stared at him. "It's right there," she said. "We're going in a completely different direction! Look!" She pushed him out of the way and reloaded the helm information. There were the coordinates---
"Hoshi?" said Reed, and she started, realizing suddenly that she had been staring blankly into space. She looked down at the console and wondered why she had thought they were wrong. Eight-two-mark-seven, there it was, right there. "Are you all right?" Reed said, taking her hands gently in his own.
"I---I thought we were going the other way," said Hoshi. She remembered thinking it, but she couldn't remember why.
"Are you sure you're all right? I can take you to Sickbay."
"No.... I'm okay," she said, brushing him off. "I guess I haven't been getting enough sleep, or something. I think maybe I should get back to the bridge now." Still uneasy, but not sure why, she nodded to Reed and headed back towards the bridge.
*********************
Reed stood in the corridor and watched her go, musing that he would never, ever understand women, Hoshi in particular. He looked at the helm info on the computer console again, shut off the station, and headed back to the armory and his update of the targeting systems. Looking at the little silver box, he tapped on the top of it and smiled in greeting as the golden alien whooshed into being.
"Good day, Lieutenant Reed," said Jolas pleasantly. "How are you doing today?"
"Having a fairly uneventful one, actually," said Reed. "Other than Sub- Commander T'Pol getting mysteriously ill, nothing has really happened."
"The Sub-commander is ill? A pity," said Jolas. "What is the problem?"
"Well, the doctor is trying to figure it out," said Reed. "She collapsed. She was unconscious.... they found her this morning." Something niggled at the back of his mind, his instincts telling him that something sounded wrong about that, but he couldn't focus the thought. "No one else has been affected."
"How very curious," said Jolas, shaking his head. "If you see her, please give her my well-wishes."
"I'll do that," said Reed. He went back to working on the targeting scanners, chatting idly with Jolas about the weapons systems on the alien's ship and the Xindi, who Jolas remembered from his own time. After a while the lingering sensation that something was awry dissipated and he gave it no further thought.
Really, it was quite an uneventful day.
*******************
Ah, I love lazy Sunday afternoons and no school on Monday. Thank Martin Luther King, Jr. that you're getting this chapter! Leave one!
