A/N Disclaimer: see chapter 1

Many thanks to my wonderful beta Dinah and Distracted for her great medical advice.

I like to thank everyone for their kind reviews.

Translation of Vulcan word:

Pluhk - Worthless person

Part one

San Francisco, Starfleet Medical Facilities

Beige - "Doctor Cutler, I am sorry to interrupt, but the Vulcan lady down the hall was just wheeled out of her room."

Dressed in his beige uniform, Yeo Han-koo, one of the guards, entered her office. Liz was in a meeting with her fellow worker doctor Bertrandt and a new interspecies couple. These kinds of conversations demanded 100 percent privacy and no disruption at all. Yeo was fully aware of this and never had interfered with patient business.

"I checked with the doctor, a certain doctor Johnson. Her paper work was good, but I never have seen this doctor," the middle-aged guard continued, with a frown on his face that showed his worry.

Half way through his story, she was already standing, feeling alarmed. T'Pol would never accept a strange doctor.

Liz offered an apology to the couple, asked Bertrandt to take over and walked outside the room with the guard. "Where did you say she went," she asked. They're standing at the middle plaza, from where you could see several hallways leading to different departments and patient rooms. "They're heading towards the Cardiology Research Facilities," Yeo answered. Liz started running in that direction, followed by Yeo.

As she ran, she realized her intuition had been right. For days, she'd had this nagging feeling that something was terribly wrong.

It had all started with admiral Black's visit. He had told T'Pol that Starfleet Intelligence had closed the investigation concerning her. The inquiry was built on so called evidence that T'Pol had sold technology to the enemy. Commander Tucker had risked his life to clear T'Pol of these accusations against her, which were nothing more than unsubstantiated charges of high treason. Now the investigation was simple dropped. It didn't make sense.

What's more, Black, who was no friend of T'Pol's, had asked her to persuade Captain Archer to come back to Earth. Archer was on a highly classified mission to rescue Tucker.

T'Pol, always dedicated to Starfleet and the crew of Enterprise, had been more than willing to help. The message for Archer had been recorded in the hospital. Liz hadn't allowed T'Pol to go outside Starfleet Medical Facilities. Her pregnancy and the baby still needed be monitored. A member of Starfleet Intelligence had come to record the message, after which it had been transmitted to the rescue team. The officer had been ill at ease around T'Pol, especially when it became clear to him T'Pol was pregnant.

Liz had told herself that her suspicions against Starfleet Intelligence were crazy. The reason for admiral Black's actions probably had to do with some highly political Starfleet games, which ways simply eluded her. So, she had doubled her focus on her work, something she knew and loved.

And now she was running down a hallway, looking for T'Pol who had disappeared with a doctor she never heard about before. Halfway she saw a friend of hers, Laura McRae. Liz asked her if she had seen a young woman in a wheelchair.

"I saw a pregnant Vulcan woman, she was sleeping," her friend said. "Is that the person you looking for?"

After Liz's confirmation, Laura told her which direction T'Pol had gone.

"This way leads to an exit door and a small parking lot," Yeo commented. Liz ran down the hallway and smashed the door open, followed closely by the guard.

Blinking against the sudden bright sunlight, she heard more than she saw that a van just drove off. Seeing clearly, there was a man in the middle of the parking laying on the ground. On his chest there were burn marks. Liz recognized them as the results of a phaser shot. She immediately pressed her communicator. "Doctor Cutler. Medical Emergency. Man down at the parking lot."

The response came at once. "Acknowledged. Doctor Cutler, which parking lot?"

"Parking lot 4!" Yeo Han-koo added, slightly out of breath. "Near exit 24."

Liz rushed to the fallen man. It was a tall man with dark blond hair and a beard. Kneeling down beside him, she checked his vitals. He was still alive. He had an upper chest wound. She used her scanner to determine that indeed the left lung was punctured. To her relief no major blood vessel had been hit.

Within seconds, the emergency team entered the scene. Years of experience kicked in. Quickly Liz used their materials and patched the sucking chest wound, front and back, so the air couldn't get through. The unknown man was placed on a stretcher and taken to the ER. There she inserted a chest tube between the ribs. She immersed the end of the chest tube in water to make the lung re-expand. She then sewed up the other holes.

A colleague, Doctor Bawa was standing by, taking over from her. He checked the patient, searched for any ID and found a press card with the name H. Dubois from the Science Monitor. "I will contact Starfleet Communication," Bawa commented, "They probably know this man."

Liz remembered an article in Science Monitor with an interview of T'Pol. It still didn't explain what this journalist was doing on the parking lot, why he had been shot or if it had something to do with T'Pol's disappearance.

She had to find T'Pol. She was about to leave the room, as the patient stirred. She was standing next to the bed and he reached for her hand. His eyes slowly opened. Liz grabbed his hand to reassure him. With great difficulty, eyes dark with pain and short of breath, he tried to say something. She leaned over. His grey-green eyes looked up to her and she heard him whisper "They got T'Pol. Help her. "

Part two

An unknown location

Beige– "Hello, Commander T'Pol."

T'Pol snapped into focus. She needed to gather every piece of information. She started with the most important person in the room and concentrated on the baby in her womb.

T'Pol could feel a gentle tingle in the back of her mind, a silent joy that touched her katra. She was content that the mother-child bond - the Tel-Ko-Mekh- had been strengthened after she had attached the artificial womb to her body.

"I will keep you safe. Always," she promised the baby through the bond. T'Lessa kicked in the womb as a response, a joyful hop, in a way reminding her of Trip. A surge of overwhelming love and joy went through her body, solid and strong.

For a split second, she was reminded of that other bond, with Elizabeth, her first baby girl and pain flared up. During her pregnancy she was reminded more and more of the loses Trip and she had shared. She suspected that the hormonal injections she had been receiving in the hospital also had an effect on her equilibrium.

She pressed the painful memory away and buried it in the deepest corners of her mind. She focused on the situation at hand.

The small vibrations coming from the artificial womb were an indication it still worked. However closely mimicking a natural womb, nourishment still had to be administrated to the artificial womb. For that reason alone, T'Pol knew she had to return to the hospital as soon as possible.

Hiding in the artificial womb, collecting data, was a monitor. It was also a beacon to locate her position. What had doctor Cutler said? With the monitor we always know where you are. Hope started to rise up in her. Starfleet would find her.

But if they failed to do so, she needed an escape plan. For now, her options were small. Her hands were tied to what seemed to be armrests, forcing her to stay in her wheelchair. She tried to loosen the straps around her pulses, but to no avail. Due to the darkness around her, she didn't see anything, but her other senses provided her with information.

There was no humming in the background that indicated she was in a space ship. The damp, cold atmosphere was similar to those she had encountered on Earth. When her kidnapper had spoken, she had heard a kind of hollow echo, like she was standing in a space without furniture. She also smelled a metallic component, behind her, like she was seated before a metallic wall. Her first thought was of an abandoned warehouse. If she listened, she could hear the wind blowing and a distant sound of a shuttle taking off. She assumed she was outside the city, perhaps near a shuttle port.

Close by, there was a man in the room, only audible by his breathing to her right. On the left was the female who just had greeted her.

The voice of the female had sounded familiar, taking her back to the time before the war. She had heard it when Malcolm and Amanda had given their evidence. The voice of the blond woman was the same as Tenson, former Starfleet official and Romulan spy.

"Hello, Ellen Tenson," T'Pol spoke aloud in the dark.

She could hear a short laugh, filled with contempt. "Tenson is just a name, belonging to the past," the female answered.

In her mind, T'Pol went through every piece of information about Tenson.

Before the war, Lieutenant Arling had been investigating her and had discovered she was a spy. Shot by Tenson, his dying last words had been in Vulcan saying: Skil-tor ahkh svi'kashkau t'ausutra. The war is won in the hearts of the people.

T'Pol had studied those words. It had been taken out of the ancient poem of V'Nar, centuries before the Awakening. The followers of Surak had changed the poem, deemed to be illogical. Only this sentence had stayed. Her father had used the phrase in his famous speech to the Senate.

"Lights on," Tenson commanded and light flooded the room.

T'Pol observed her surroundings. The place she was in was indeed a sort of warehouse. There was nothing in the room except from some dusty looking crates with some beige papers on top of them. On the crates there was a logo with a beige background, a picture of a white seagull and faded letters. There was some water on the floor that looked like rain water.

Tenson was like she had imagined: with blond hair and looking perfectly Human. The only thing that stood out was her colorful turquoise dress. The male had short gray hair, broad eyebrows and a smirk on his face. She recognized him.

When Trip had told her about his secret mission, she had asked him about every person involved. Commander Peterson had been Trip's Starfleet Intelligence contact person. Information about him was almost impossible to find, until she found a picture of a student group with a young Arthur Peterson. The man in the room had the same features, only older.

His smell, his whole presence, the cold steel in his eyes, she was positive he wasn't Human. Perhaps he was an alien spy, who altered his appearance to look like Arthur Peterson and who had infiltrated Starfleet. How many of them were there?

"We have discovered that you have a unique ability," the woman formerly known as Tenson said. There was a shrill tone in her voice. "We have more than sufficient evidence to establish there is a bond between you and the Human called Tucker. He is with your father Kirak."

Tenson spoke that last name with such hatred T'Pol knew they were after her father. And she was the bait.

Tenson carried on. "And don't insult me by saying your father is dead or that you don't have a bond that could reach that far. When Tucker was on Columbia, you were able to contact him through the bond. In fact, you have talked with Tucker in his present location, all thanks to this bond."

Only a few people knew about her bond with Trip and she trusted them with her life. As for the reference to Colombia, only Trip and she knew about their meetings in her white space. How could Tenson know about it? What's more, why was she telling her these things? As though Tenson wasn't afraid of the information coming out.

She went cold as it suddenly dawned on her. They would kill her – and with her T'Lessa - after she was of no use to them.

The old words her father had told her emerged from her mind - Dakh pthak – Cast out fear. She repeated the ancient Vulcan words, until she felt her fear for T'Lessa's life flowing away.

"You will instruct Tucker to tell your father to contact my brother Delon. After disclosing his location to Delon, he will then surrender to him," Tenson laid down her demands.

"If not," for the first time the look-a-like Peterson spoke in a cold and detached matter, "we will put a phaser at your belly. Or we will investigate if your child can survive outside this artificial womb. I think it will suffocate, just like your first offspring." He grinned in anticipation and T'Pol hated him for it.

His words brought back a devastatingly painful memory that she had buried deep inside of her. Elizabeth had died due to several defects in her DNA. T'Pol had seen her little girl struggle for breath in her dying moments, and now this filth was mocking her.

Wild, primitive feelings erupted inside of her and for a moment a mixture of powerful emotions of pain, grief and anger flooded over her, taking every logical restraint in its path. T'Pol clenched her hands into fists, digging her nails deep in the palms of her hands. Frustration and rage ran through her. She pulled with all her strength at her restrains, wanting to break free. She would then put her hands on the neck of this pluhk and tear him to pieces.

The emotions brought her back to a moment when she had felt the same. She had been filled with rage and pain after Elizabeth's death. She had tried to meditate in her quarters, dressed in her father's robe, but it hadn't helped.

Only when Trip had come and she and he had mourned together had the storm of wild emotions seemed to calm. In her mind she relived the moment as she drew strength from him. His blue eyes tearing up, their hands clenched, as they grieved together.

She used this memory to dampen the assault of violent emotions rising up in her. With force she pushed the raging emotions down, using old Vulcan techniques to calm down her erratic breathing, calming the storm. The haze in her mind disintegrated.

She felt the tips of her ears burn in embarrassment. She had slipped, shown her fury in front of two aliens.

Then she realized shame was illogical. The bond was fueling her rage and she didn't care if they saw her love for her daughter.

"Quiet an emotional display, Vulcan," said Peterson mockingly, "Didn't Surak say that revenge is illogical."

"So is cruelty," she replied, now fully in control, "and you combine both of them."

She turned to Tenson. "This is about revenge on my father. But he poses no threat to the Romulan empire. He is a prisoner of war, a servant, who you humiliated by cutting off the point of his right ear."

"Veruul," Tenson said, probably using a slur to address her. "This is not about revenge. This is about protecting the Empire against Kirak's ideas."

"If you're so powerful, why be afraid of a few ideas?"

"Your father was a servant in my family, a nobody. But his divergent ideas are dangerous. He wants a coalition between Vulcans and Romulans. His ideas suggests that both Vulcan and Romulan ideas have merit. But we are far better and superior. It is a gift to live under Romulan rule. The sword will convince people in their heart to obey the Empire."

"If his ideas are ineffective, why do you go after him?" T'Pol replied, trying to find the logic behind this.

"Because many weakhearted people believe him. My younger brother and sister listened to his ideas and turned against the Empire. They became traitors because of him. They helped him escape and have become followers, disgracing our clan. And his movement is growing. Servants are refusing to help in our wars. There is no room for debate. It has to stop. The hearts of the people should be focused on the glory of the Empire."

"The war is won in the hearts of the people," T'Pol said slowly.

"Exactly," Tenson straightened her back. "It's time to contact Tucker. I expect your father to surrender himself, if he wants his grandchild to live."

Peterson grabbed the handles of the wheelchair and rolled her into another room. It was dark in there and smelled of Human blood and sweat.

"For my meditation I need a candle" T'Pol requested, knowing she had to stall time. "To obtain the right state for contacting my bondmate, I need to sit in the meditation position, preferably on a pillow."

Tenson released the restraints and let her out of the wheelchair. T'Pol stretched her stiff legs and moved her arms. Peterson got a pillow and a candle.

With difficulty she seated herself. The artificial womb made it difficult to achieve a good meditation position on the floor. Quickly she ran her hand over her belly and the artificial womb. She had missed being able to touch it. By each touch, her bond with T'Lessa grew.

Peterson lit the candle and Tenson handcuffed her again.

They left and T'Pol closed her eyes. She took a deep breath. In the silence she tried to concentrate on the flame. As she did, she heard a noise. It was behind the walls of this room. T'Pol listened carefully. It was a faint whisper, almost like moaning or crying. It would indicate she was not the only prisoner.

Her new discovery raised many questions, but first she had to enter her white space. She thought about how Trip had learned to meditate, one step at the time. Over the years he had surprised her with his ability to adapt to Vulcan ways, including meditation.

"Breathe," she told herself, like she had told Trip, many years ago. He had joked that he knew how to breathe from the day he was born. She had argued with him, as always enjoying the bantering between them, and had told him that there were several ways to breathe.

She warmed herself with the memory and with the thought that she would see Trip again in her white space, but also, when this was over, in the real world. She stubbornly held on to this illogical hope, one of the good things she had learned being bonded with a Human.

T'Pol started the simplest breathing pattern to gain a meditative state. She breathed in and out. She had to reach Trip. Lives depended on it.