Chapter Four: Worst Away Mission Ever
The mood in the launch bay was subdued when Kamea arrived. Trip was still preparing the shuttle pod for takeoff, with T'Pol's assistance. Hoshi was pacing impatiently off to the side, mumbling to herself in what sounded suspiciously like Klingon. Malcolm had not yet arrived.
Kamea's stomach gurgled, reminding her that if she continued down that line of thinking, she was headed for another ulcer. She knew she had overreacted back in the captain's ready room when Malcolm protested her assignment to the mission. She actually didn't want to go – Altara held a lot of unpleasant memories for her – but the fact that Malcolm was implying that she was incapable of completing the mission was highly insulting, especially his insinuation that she would need him to protect her. Now she wanted to go just to prove that she could do it – not only to Malcolm, but also to the captain and the rest of the crew.
Why did she still feel the need to prove herself? Most of the crew had begun to accept her as one of their own, particularly the engineering staff, but a few of the crewmembers continued to talk about her behind her back, under the incredibly mistaken impression that she couldn't hear what they were saying. She never said anything about it, but she knew that Rostov – and possibly Kelby – had approached the captain and informed him of the situation.
That was all she needed – to be rescued by the captain. It was the adult equivalent of being rescued by the teacher. Or her mother, God forbid. Well, she had endured the taunts in high school and she could get through this. She would do well on this mission and prove to everyone that she belonged not just on Enterprise but among humans in general.
Trip and T'Pol finished whatever they were doing as Kamea was stowing her gear in the shuttle pod, but they continued to converse quietly among themselves. Kamea cocked an eyebrow but said nothing. She wondered if T'Pol had told Trip about the bond, but judging from the fact that Trip had seemed perfectly normal lately, she guessed not. She hated keeping a secret like that; Trip had a right to know that he and T'Pol were bonded, but that damn Vulcan stubbornness had T'Pol refusing to tell him. She seemed to think it was for the best, but anything that kept two people apart who were obviously in love was not for the best.
Of course, T'Pol was married. So maybe it was for the best – for the moment. But if T'Pol felt it necessary to meddle in Kamea's business, than Kamea considered it only fair to be able to meddle in hers. And meddle she would, when she was feeling up to it.
Kamea glanced over at Trip and T'Pol and saw that T'Pol was walking towards her. She looked around for Trip, but he was nowhere in sight.
"Kamea," T'Pol said, stopping directly in front of her and clasping her hands behind her back, "is there anything we should know about this planet before we descend?"
"Well," Kamea said, continuing to look for Trip, "as it's more than eighty percent water, I should warn you that the ground is really marshy. If you're not careful, you could sink into the mud."
T'Pol cleared her throat, and Kamea looked at her. "Am I keeping you from something, Kamea?"
Kamea pursed her lips, sensing that she had upset her cousin. Her face dissolved into what she hoped was a convincing smile, and she shook her head. "Nope. I was just checking to see if we were all here." She paused, chewing on her bottom lip. Malcolm was conspicuously absent. "We're not."
"Is there anything else?" The tone of T'Pol's voice made it clear that she thought there was something else, and Kamea simply wasn't telling them. She raised her eyebrows and waited for Kamea to continue.
Kamea shrugged sheepishly. "Not really."
T'Pol made a noise in the back of her throat. "What about the native population?"
"Oh," Kamea said. She'd completely forgotten. "The Altarans are cool. No worries."
Malcolm chose that moment to arrive, and even though Kamea was furious with him, she couldn't help but be grateful. T'Pol looked mad enough to spit nails. T'Pol leveled one last glare at Kamea and then motioned that everyone should gather around her. Kamea was, of course, already standing by her. Hoshi stopped her incessant pacing and wandered over, and Malcolm hovered in the door to the shuttle pod.
"We are to split into two teams," T'Pol said. "Ensign Sato will come with me. Kamea," she said, looking directly at Kamea, "you will go with Lieutenant Reed."
Kamea exhaled sharply through her nose but nodded. She had expected that. She chanced a glance at Malcolm and saw that he was stubbornly refusing to meet her gaze. She rolled her eyes and returned her attention to T'Pol. If he wanted to be immature, she could play that game.
"Our first priority is to determine the species of the biosigns we detected," said T'Pol. Kamea kept her mouth shut, not anxious to upset T'Pol by interrupting, but she already knew the species of the biosigns. "After we have done so, we will attempt to locate the source of the interference. If it is natural, we have nothing to worry about."
"And if it's not?" Hoshi asked. There was a note of fear in her voice. Kamea looked over at her.
T'Pol never missed a beat. "We will deal with that if necessary." She gestured to Trip, who had suddenly reappeared. "Commander Tucker will take us down to the surface. Once there, we will establish a time to rendezvous back at the landing coordinates and return to Enterprise." She began to walk back and forth in front of them. "As this planet is largely unexplored, any information you collect will be satisfactory. Try to learn as much about the ecosystem and the planet's inhabitants as possible before we rendezvous."
This continued for some time and ended with T'Pol handing each of them a hand-held scanner and a phase pistol, which Malcolm promptly removed from Kamea's hand. She opened her mouth to yell at him, but Trip intervened, stepping between the two of them to prevent her from retaliating. Once T'Pol had finished, everyone climbed into the shuttle pod. Kamea immediately claimed a spot up front, next to Trip, much to T'Pol's apparent dismay, and though Kamea did not want to incur the wrath of her cousin, the alternative was not acceptable. Besides, if she sat in the co-pilot's seat, she could learn how to fly the shuttle pod. One never knew when such information would come in handy.
Trip went through the necessary pre-flight activities. As soon as they were clear for departure, he turned to Kamea. "So, your first away mission," he said, grinning. "How d'you feel?"
An accurate description of how she felt would take days. She settled for dropping her head into her hands and saying, "Bloody hell."
Trip chuckled and pulled back on the controls, easing the shuttle pod out of the launch bay and into open space. "You're hanging around Malcolm too much."
Hoshi had never been on an away mission with this level of tension. It permeated the shuttle pod, making for a very uncomfortable trip to the surface. All of Hoshi's attempts at conversation had been shot down with a warning glare from one of the other four occupants. She knew the reason that Malcolm and Kamea were in such foul moods – Travis had relayed the news of their argument in the captain's ready room – but she had no idea why Trip and T'Pol were being so snarky. Though, if she had to venture a guess, she would bet that it had something to do with Kamea.
Hoshi liked Kamea, but she knew why T'Pol had such a problem with her. T'Pol felt threatened by Kamea's presence. Kamea had come aboard Enterprise and almost effortlessly finagled her way into Commander Tucker's good graces. Of course it would rub T'Pol the wrong way, when she so clearly had feelings for the commander, that Trip got along so well with Kamea.
But T'Pol didn't have anything to worry about. Kamea had mentioned on more than one occasion that Commander Tucker was like the older brother she'd never had. "Which is weird," she would always say, "since I'm almost twice his age." Besides, Kamea liked Malcolm. That much was obvious.
The trip took less than thirty minutes. Trip set the pod down in a rare clearing, and T'Pol opened the shuttle pod door. Hoshi took one glance outside and immediately felt like she was home.
The single land mass on Altara was a gigantic rainforest. The ground was marshy and muddy, quite unlike the ground in Brazil, but there was nothing but trees as far as the eye could see. They even looked like the trees on Earth – but the trunks were thicker, the branches more gnarled than those of the Brazilian rainforest. The sky was barely visible through the thick canopy of leaves, and though Hoshi knew that the planet's surface was primarily water, she could see none nearby.
"It's beautiful," she heard herself say.
"Bloody hell," came Malcolm's voice, and she turned around to find that Malcolm had sunk into the mud and, in attempting to pull his feet out of the muck, had lost one of his boots.
T'Pol was scanning the area with a perturbed look. After a few seconds, her brow furrowed even further, and she put away her scanner. "The interference is not being caused by the atmosphere. The readings are no more accurate here than they are on Enterprise."
Trip nodded his head thoughtfully. "I'll try the sensors in the pod." He climbed into the shuttle pod and presumably sat down in the pilot's chair. His voice carried out into the forest. "Maybe your scanner just isn't powerful enough to penetrate."
Kamea giggled, and when Hoshi looked at her, she winked. "Sorry," she said. "Sleep deprivation. Makes everything funny."
Hoshi rotated slowly on the spot, taking in the breathtaking view. She was still edgy about away missions; she never seemed to have a calm, relaxing one, but so far this one wasn't all that bad – except for the massive tension. She looked back at Kamea. "Is the whole planet like this?"
"Pretty much," Kamea said, nodding. "Remind you of home?"
Hoshi stared at Kamea in shock. "How did you know where I'm from?"
Kamea shrugged halfheartedly. "I do my research."
Trip poked his head out of the shuttle pod. "You're right, T'Pol. Something else is causing the interference."
Malcolm walked over to them, careful not to get his feet caught in the mud again. "Someone could be jamming our frequencies."
"It isn't the Altarans," Kamea said. "They don't have the technology to do something like that."
"Does anyone else live here?" Trip asked.
Kamea shook her head. "There's no one else in this system. Altara's the only inhabited planet for light-years." She paused, placing her hands on her hips. "Of course, that isn't to say that someone else didn't stumble across this planet and decide to set up camp here for a while."
"But who else even knows about this place?" Hoshi asked, confused. "According to T'Pol, there's no reported contact – "
"If it's in the Vulcan database," said Kamea, "other species are probably aware of it as well. You can never be too careful."
Trip looked at T'Pol, who had been uncharacteristically silent during the discussion. "What do you want to do?"
T'Pol folded her arms across her chest and looked at Trip. "We will do what the captain asked us to do, but we will not stay as long as originally planned. Commander, you will wait here with the shuttle pod. Ensign Sato and I will head east. Lieutenant Reed and Kamea, you go west. We will attempt to locate the source of the interference, but if we are unable to do so by the designated time, we will rendezvous back here and return to Enterprise. If there is someone else here, it would not be wise to spend the night."
They agreed to rendezvous back at the pod in a few hours, which wouldn't give them much time to search. But Hoshi didn't want to be on a planet with a potentially hostile and unknown alien race, so she didn't argue with T'Pol's plan.
"I'll try and get a message to Enterprise," said Trip, once again disappearing into the shuttle pod. "Maybe our communications aren't affected."
"You have your orders, Lieutenant," T'Pol said to Malcolm, who nodded, though he did not look pleased.
As Malcolm and Kamea disappeared into the woods off to Hoshi's left, she had the sudden fear that they would kill each other. She hoped that she was wrong.
Malcolm gritted his teeth. This was already turning out to be the worst away mission he had ever been on – including that one where he, Hoshi, and the captain had caught some alien virus that had altered their DNA – and it had barely started. Thankfully it would only last another few hours.
Kamea was angry with him, and neither had spoken since leaving the landing site. They hadn't spoken to each other since their argument in the captain's ready room. And now she was walking at a brisk pace, seemingly not caring whether or not they were discovered by whomever was jamming their sensors, given the amount of noise she was making as she trudged her way down the barely visible trail through the forest.
So far, that was all they'd encountered – lots of forest. Trees, mud, long grasses – there was nothing else on this planet. It was layered with a heavy fog, as well. The farther they walked, the thicker the fog became. It soaked his clothing through and – with no sun to dry him – made it seem colder than it really was. He held his scanner out at arm's length, but due to the interference had not found anything more interesting than a species of frog, which he had quickly left behind.
He glanced up at Kamea, who continued to walk approximately twenty paces ahead of him. He hadn't meant to upset her, but he had to say something. He could barely control himself on Enterprise. With the two of them practically alone on an away mission – on a sparsely populated planet, no less – he was positive that he would be unable to resist the temptation to act on his physical attraction to her, however inappropriate it may be.
But his attraction was currently waning, as the last time Kamea had even looked at him, he was afraid she was going to kill him. She could do that, too. He'd seen what she'd done to that punching bag; she hadn't even blinked as it had exploded. Normally Malcolm liked explosions, but not if he was going to be the thing exploding. At least he'd taken her weapon away, so she couldn't shoot him.
"Do you always walk so quickly?" he asked, desperate to say something. The silence was unnerving. "Or so noisily?"
She didn't bother to look back at him. "When I have a purpose."
He didn't like the edge in her voice. "And that would be…?"
This time she did turn. Her eyes were cold and hard, and he was beginning to wish he'd never agreed to come. He was hydrophobic, and he was on a planet that was ninety percent water. What the hell had been thinking?
"Getting away from you, Lieutenant."
He scrubbed a hand over his face. "I don't suppose it would help if I apologized."
"No," she said, turning back around and continuing to storm through the marsh. "I don't suppose it would."
Malcolm sighed and struggled to keep up. What was it about the two of them together that made them act like children? He was British – Brits didn't have immature arguments. But every time they fought, it was like he was back in grade school. "Look," he said, trying to walk fast without allowing his boots to sink into the muck, "we're going to have to work together if we're going to find out what's going on."
He looked around, feeling suddenly claustrophobic. The trees grew so close together that at times he could only see a wall of tree trunks. "Where are we going?"
She glanced at him, and he noticed that her eyes had softened somewhat. She nodded at the trail ahead. "The Altarans' village is that way. Maybe they know what's going on."
They walked on in silence, but it wasn't quite as deafening as it had been earlier. The tension between the two of them had eased somewhat. Malcolm continued to scan, even though he knew the readings would be inaccurate, simply because he needed something to do. Kamea ambled along beside him, seemingly staring off into space but presumably leading them to this fabled village, which no one in the universe seemed to be aware of save her.
"I don't appreciate being treated like a child," she said. She met his gaze, and he was surprised at the hurt in her eyes. "I'm older than you, you know. I don't like being patronized."
Malcolm raised his eyebrows. "That wasn't my intention."
Kamea's eyes narrowed, but there was very little anger in them. It was still mostly hurt. "You implied that I was unsuitable for this mission."
"I didn't say that," Malcolm said, feeling his frustration return. She was putting words into his mouth and had completely misinterpreted him. "I just – " He struggled to think of a lie, because he could not tell her the truth. "I'm just used to a certain amount of protocol. Civilians should not be present on away missions. There are too many risks involved. Something could go seriously wrong."
Her expression warmed slightly. "I appreciate your concern, but I'm sure I've made it evident that I'm capable of handling myself."
She had. If their late-night spars hadn't made that perfectly clear, the way she dealt with the Ferengi had. She could definitely hold her own, but it was a risk she didn't have to take, as she was not an official member of Enterprise. "You have. I just feel responsible for everyone on the ship. It's my job to protect them. When something happens, if someone gets hurt, I blame myself. It's who I am."
Kamea stopped walking and stared at him, and for a moment he was convinced that she knew he was lying. But unless he was mistaken, there were tears in her eyes. "I'm sorry. I overreacted." She took a deep breath. "I just thought… I thought there was something…"
She trailed off, suddenly looking in the direction they had just come. Her ears perked and searched for the source of the sound, reminding him strongly of a cat. Her nostrils flared; she appeared to be smelling the air. She looked around cautiously, then reached out to touch him gently on the chest, as if to reassure herself that he was still there.
The simple contact was jarring, but Malcolm immediately became worried. "You hear something?" he asked, readying his phase pistol.
She shook her head, her eyes wide with fear. He didn't think had ever seen a Vulcan look afraid. It scared him. "I smell death here."
Malcolm shuddered involuntarily, then took her by the hand and led her off the trail, into the forest. They dodged behind trees, trying to avoid being seen. Well, he dodged, pulling her along with him. They had gone several dozen meters when Kamea planted her firmly in the mud.
"If there were anyone around," she said, "I'd sense them. But something is not right. I can feel it in the air."
He watched in fascination as Kamea knelt down and ran her hand along the ground, just above the top of the grass, as if she were feeling something out. She cocked her head to the side, so that it was parallel to the ground, staring at the mud, like she was expecting it to tell her something. Then she let her head fall back so that was gazing up into the canopy. Her ears continued to move – he had never seen anything like it.
She looked up at him. "Something has happened."
He furrowed his brow in confusion. How the hell could she possibly know? "What?"
She stood up and jerked her head over her shoulder. "We have to get to the village. Something's wrong." With that, she turned around and darted down the trail.
Wordlessly, he followed.
Captain Archer continued to pace the area in front of his chair. Four members of his senior staff were on the surface of a planet about which they knew nothing, and he was unable to contact them. According to Ensign Harris, who had taken Hoshi's post, there had been several unknown spikes, which she believed was the shuttle pod attempting to send a message. Whatever the interference was, it prevented communication.
He didn't want to think of all the things that could go wrong. Had something happened to the shuttle pod? If something had happened, there was nothing Enterprise could do about it. Should they send down another team in Shuttle Pod One and hope that they could locate the others? Was it even necessary? They had no reason to believe that the away team was in any kind of danger – other than the mysterious interference and the lack of communications.
Archer glanced up at the sound of Travis's voice. "Is that part of the floor lower than the rest of it?" asked Travis. He had turned in his seat to face the captain.
"What?" Archer asked. Had the boomer been attempt to talk to him and Archer had been lost in his own thoughts? What kind of captain was he if he couldn't focus?
"It's just, people are always pacing there," Travis said with a shrug. "I'm surprised there isn't a hole."
Archer narrowed his eyes, and Travis smiled sheepishly. "Okay," the boomer said. "Wrong time to try that joke."
"Sir," said Harris, "we're being hailed."
He looked at her. "The away team?"
Harris shook her head. "No, sir. The message is in Andorian."
A/N: "Snarky", for those who aren't familiar with the term, means "pissy", "snippy", "crabby". Things like that. I don't know if that's a common word or if we just use it here in central PA, so I thought I'd include a definition.
Hee hee hee. Trip said "penetrate".
Life is very hectic for me at the moment, as I'm currently working full-time at the bank while I'm being trained, and whoever coined the term "banker's hours" obviously never worked in a modern bank, because I swear I'm there all the time, so I apologize if the updates take longer than I had originally stipulated. Last night I didn't get home until 7:30, and I had to go in this morning at 8:15. I am trying my very best, but sadly the story is not yet finished, though I do have up through chapter 7 and most of chapter 8 written, and I'm only planning on it being 9 or 10 chapters, so it almost done but not completely and for the next two and a half weeks I'm at the mercy of my trainer -- who is cute, but married. Unfortunately.
Reviews make me very happy. People who don't review make me and puppies sad. And you don't want to make puppies sad, do you?
