Chapter Twelve – Of Lorian and Lily

"Oh, bloody sodding hell!" The twelve-year old threw the dysfunctional plasma injector across the room. It bounced off the sofa and landed on the floor with a clunk.

"Lily," her father said sternly from the bed.

"Sorry, Dad," she pouted.

"I'm serious, Lily."

"Sorry, Dad." The girl retrieved the injector and set back to work taking it apart. "Uncle Trip said this can be fixed, but he won't tell me how."

"Well, he wants you to figure it out by yourself." Archer glanced over at his older child with equal parts affection and exasperation. "You're a smart girl. Just focus." He knew that Lily's project had less to do with fixing the injector and more to do with keeping her out of trouble for at least a short period of time. Between his daughter and Lorian, they all had their hands full.

Sometimes Archer thought that some cosmic force had, for a joke, shuffled the children. Lily was a miniature Trip: a brilliant budding-engineer at twelve, with a dangerously curious mind and frighteningly little impulse control. Her mantra seemed to consist of variations of, "I wonder what would happen if . . .?" There were few components on the ship that Lily had not at least tried to disassemble, or to combine in new and interesting ways. Archer had long since gotten used to the cold knot of dread in his stomach that occurred whenever he had gone without seeing or speaking to his daughter for more than a few hours. Silence, in her case, was ominous.

The only saving grace was that Lily's best friend was Lorian, Trip and T'Pol's fourteen year old son. Archer knew that it was only Lorian's steadying presence, his more cautious personality, that kept them from getting into even more scrapes than they did. When Archer looked at Lorian, he saw Trip (except for the ears) - sandy hair, deep blue eyes, easy smile, but when the boy spoke, it was with T'Pol's thoughtful deliberation.

Being half-Vulcan, Lorian could generally calculate the likely outcome of Lily's actions, and spent a great deal of energy trying to talk her out of reprogramming ship's systems. When he could, his mild manner soothed her disappointment; when he couldn't, he shared in the inevitable dressing down that resulted. Usually it was the Chief Engineer who handled discipline, mainly because it was his department that was typically the target of their schemes, but also because the captain's punishment would inevitably be ten times worse.

To their credit, Lorian's and Lily's ideas were almost always sound in conception, if not in execution. Like the time they attempted to give Archer's data padd a voice; the solicitous voice they chose would actually have been very helpful, if they could have found a way to keep it from narrating each of the million separate functions the computer performed per second.

But Lorian was in his glory when he stood side by side with Archer in the Command Center. The astral map of the Expanse was now, after a decade and a half, minutely detailed. The mysterious spheres, slightly fewer now than there would be in a century, still emitted data, only a fraction of which they would ever understand in their lifetimes. Day after day they worked, analyzing, calculating, looking for something, anything, that would give them even a slight advantage when the Xindi probe was launched toward Earth a hundred years from now. Archer's obsession was now becoming Lorian's as well.

If Lily was Trip's shadow, and Lorian was Archer's, then Archer guessed it was only fair that his younger child, six year old Jon-Henry, essentially belonged to T'Pol. Oddly enough, although he was the spitting image of his father, with his brown hair and green eyes, Jon-Henry was as Ikaaran as he could be in personality. After having spent the first six weeks of his life hovering between life and death in a Sickbay incubator (the same incubator that had sustained Porthos during the Kretassian Crisis), Jon-Henry had started talking early and had never stopped. His first, second, and third words had been "Why?", "How?", and "Whassat?"

He could out-talk his mother, which was a feat in and of itself. He questioned everything in a wonderingly curious manner that was endearing for the first five minutes, and maddening the rest of the time.

Until he discovered T'Pol.

The Vulcan's limitless patience became a perfect match for Jon-Henry's infinite questions. As she had with Lorian, T'Pol spent many hours teaching the child discipline and direction, so that his many questions led him to deeper understanding, instead of just creating noise. Occasionally, a basic "How come?" from the child would lead her to suspect long-held scientific assumptions. He was a constant reminder for her to "keep an open mind." She had confided to Archer with some surprise that humans might be capable of embracing a great deal more logic than she had previously expected, if they were trained from infancy.

His mother, Esilia, didn't mind at all. It was customary for Ikaaran children to have an avyah, a guardian from birth who guided them through life and took responsibility for making most of the major decisions affecting the child. She considered T'Pol to be Jon-Henry's avyah. And since she had always known that T'Pol had been Archer's first choice for a mate, all those years ago, it was only fitting, in her opinion, that the Vulcan would end up helping him raise his son. The cosmos really did have a sense of balance.

x x x

"Explain to me again, will you, why you thought it would be a good idea to go into the catwalk?" Trip's southern drawl was more pronounced than it had been in twenty years, he was so angry. "Maybe the fifth time you tell me, it will make some damn sense."

Lorian and Lily stood silent, hands behind backs, eyes down. The entire Engineering area was quiet; even the reactor seemed to whisper.

"ANSWER ME!" Trip thundered, his fury made even more evident by the fact that he never yelled. The words echoed off of every solid surface in the room. Even Ensign Massaro flinched. She had found the two trying to override the security code to the catwalk that ran along the starboard nacelle. Now, she wasn't sure if she had consigned them to a worse fate.

Lily cleared her throat. "We were learning about atmospheric disturbances. Our teacher told us about the time the whole crew had to stay in the catwalk for a week." She peeked up, but Trip's face was still livid. "We wanted to see what it looked like."

"Did your teacher neglect to tell you that you would get your ASSES FRIED if you went into the catwalk with the warp reactor on-line?"

"We, um." Lily ran out of words.

"We weren't going to go all the way in, Father," Lorian put in reasonably.

"Oh, you weren't." Trip ambled over to the comm. "Tucker to the Bridge."

"Archer here." The young people glanced at each other, hearts sinking.

"I've got the Gremlins down here in Engineering. Seems they were trying to access the starboard catwalk."

"I'm on my way."

By the time the captain reached Engineering, the kids were trembling. Trip didn't usually defer discipline to the commanding officer; everybody in the room understood that this was going to be ugly. Lily and Lorian had even heard rumors, as all the children had, that the captain had once gotten so mad at a crewmember that he had decompressed him in an airlock and then shot him out into space. They both decided at that moment that the rumor was probably true.

The captain listened as Massaro related the events. He walked around the two of them, as if inspecting them. Finally, he spoke, using his dreaded "quiet voice."

"Do you think that security protocols are in place just for fun?" His green eyes glittered.

"No, sir," they whispered.

"Or that when the captain and the Chief Engineer tell you that certain places are off limits, we must be mistaken?"

Mutely, they shook their heads.

Archer lifted his chin and stared off to the side for a moment. "Well, clearly you believe that you know more than we do, despite the fact that Commander Tucker and I have been running this ship for almost twenty years." He paced three steps, then swung around and paced back. "Perhaps it is time you started learning to take over." He stopped abruptly, eyes flicking over their casual clothes. "Go change into something more suitable, and meet me on the Bridge in fifteen minutes."

"Sir?" Lorian croaked. The Bridge was strictly off-limits to children. Period.

The captain fixed him with a cold glare. "Something wrong with your hearing, mister?"

"N-no, sir."

"Fifteen minutes."

Fourteen and a half minutes later, the lift doors opened, and two scared, awed adolescents stepped onto the Bridge of Enterprise for the first time. Archer let them hang there for a moment. T'Pol busied herself at her console. Trip had already commed her with a brief explanation, ending with a cryptic, "Cap'n's handling it."

The captain rose slowly from his chair and beckoned Lorian forward. His voice was a shade warmer, but still hard, as he said, "Since you think you know how this ship should be run, I think it's only fair that you start your command training now. It is the captain's job to monitor everything that goes on. That is what you will do for this shift. Unfortunately, there's only one chair, and it's mine, so you'll have to stand." He positioned Lorian to the left and slightly behind the command chair, facing the blank view screen. Then he turned to his daughter.

"And you, Miss Archer, have a natural gift for engineering, so here you go. The Chief Engineer is rarely on the Bridge, but when he is, he monitors ship's functions from tactical." He took her tightly by the upper arm and pulled her over to stand next to Reed. "He doesn't have a seat, so you'll have to stand, as well." He strode back down to his chair and sat. "Any requests to leave your posts will be denied." He watched the realization sink in that they would be standing there for the next nine hours.

As he picked up his padd, he caught T'Pol's eye. Her face was perfectly neutral, so he knew she didn't disapprove.

By the end of the shift, he had to admit he was impressed. Sore from standing, exhausted, and probably dying to use the bathroom, neither Lorian nor Lily had whimpered or complained. Lily had pointed out a misalignment in the tactical array, and had spent about an hour walking through the solution with Reed. Lorian had stood computing astral distances in his head, from time to time using a finger to draw numbers in the air, until Archer had finally taken pity on the boy and given him a padd to work on.

As for Archer, he had a splitting headache from squinting at the padd's tiny blue screen all day. He much preferred nowadays to work in his Ready Room, with its full size monitor, to get through the mounds of paperwork that still consumed his days. He could barely make out the words as he plowed his way through department logs, inventory lists, requisitions, and the hundred other details that were his daily responsibility.

And his butt was numb.

Finally, he spoke. "Lorian, Lily, you're dismissed. Go get some dinner." The children left the Bridge quickly, if stiffly, their painful lessons learned.

Archer groaned loudly as he heaved himself from the chair. He shook the pins and needles out of his left leg as he limped over to the science station. "These children are trying to kill me."

T'Pol answered thoughtfully. "It seems that we have been remiss. Clearly, we need to begin training the children to take over our duties. Perhaps we should formalize the process. An apprenticeship."

She was right, as usual, Archer mused. He had been running on the assumption that the senior staff would always be the same. But while T'Pol could easily replace him as captain, who would come behind her? Or Trip? Or Phlox? "Can you put together a training program, a schedule of some sort? Maybe if we give these kids actual jobs, they'll stay out of trouble." He rubbed his burning eyes.

T'Pol cocked her head slightly. "That would be a welcome change of pace," she observed.

x x x

"Esilia to Archer."

The comm interrupted the captain's concentration. Sprawled across the bed in his uncharacteristically empty and quiet quarters, he was enjoying an old water polo match. The fact that he had seen it approximately ten times already, and was well aware of which team eventually won, didn't diminish his enjoyment one bit. He reached over. "Archer."

"Would you mind meeting me at the scout?"

He sighed. After the day he'd had, the last thing he wanted was to deal with some mechanical malfunction. But he rarely got to spend any time alone with his wife nowadays; there was always a kid or three underfoot. It had been a while since they'd watched a movie or even taken a late night shipwalk together. "On my way," he replied, and fished around on the floor for his boots.

Launch Bay One was dark, and he made his way mostly by memory to Esilia's ship, parked just on theother side of Shuttle Pod One. Over the years, he had become accustomed to her hanging out here, because it was the one place on board she could crank up both the heat and humidity to Ikaaran comfort. Keeping an environment of thirty-eight degrees and ninety percent humidity was a good way to ensure that no human would disturb you.

The crew had come to refer to the scout ship as The Seal, a play on Esilia's name that she didn't quite get. She often commented on the humans' tendency to shorten names, an odd habit. Jonathan became "Jon"; Hoshi was shortened to "Hosh"; even Charles was somehow transformed into "Trip," a progression which, try as she might, she could not follow. She finally realized that the humans didn't even hear the pronounced pause in between the two syllables of T'Pol's name, so the whole thing got contracted and lost its musical quality. While she had stopped minding that everyone called her daughter Lily, instead of her full name (once she had learned that a lily was a particularly beautiful Earth flower, she really couldn't protest anymore), she insisted that her son be called "Jon-Henry," a name that her husband hadn't been too keen on. He had felt it a bit too long a label for such a tiny baby, and had tried to shorten it to Jay, but Esilia wouldn't have it. Eventually the name, and the boy, had grown on him.

But now the children were wearing him out.

Esilia heard the soft knock on the hatch of the scout and released the lock.

Jghonn stepped in, looking tired and distracted. He immediately began to sweat in the - for him - tropical heat. She stayed in the shadows, only the glow from the instrument panel breaking up the darkness.

"I hear you had a challenging day," she said softly.

He flapped the bottom of his shirt, which was already beginning to stick to his skin. "Your daughter . . ."

She snickered. "Oh, so she's my daughter when she exasperates you." Approaching, she slid behind him and began to massage his tense shoulders. She could feel the immediate tingle of contact, a sensation that had not diminished over the past fifteen years. Her hands slipped under his casual tee-shirt, skimming over still-solid muscle and smooth skin. His fatigue began to give way to desire.

Tipping his head back, he murmured, "I think I'm getting too old for this job, Seel. I don't have the patience I used to."

The hem of his shirt rose higher, and she bent her head to trace his spine with her tongue. "Dealing with children is completely different from commanding a ship full of green crewmembers. They'll learn." She pulled the shirt gently over his head and kissed his shoulder. "I probably would have keel-hauled them both."

"The thought crossed my mind," he groaned, leaning back into her. Then he froze. "You're not wearing any clothes," he accused, feeling the electricity of her skin against his.

"Very observant, fly-boy."

"The kids, Jon-Henry -"

"Is with his friend Toku, and Lily went to movie night." She reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out his communicator. "Don't need this." He heard it thump into a dark corner.

He turned her in his arms. "How much time do we have?" he asked in a gruff voice, lowering her to the deck. She had thoughtfully laid a duvet down for the full seduction effect.

She chuckled against his mouth. "Do you really think that, after today's events, anybody wants to disturb you for the rest of the night?"

"They're probably hoping you'll put me in a better mood," he answered, trailing his lips down her throat, and then lower.

She moaned softly. "I'll do my best."