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Shuttle One

"Trip! Hey, Trip! You're with us?" that was the Captain's baritone.

"Trip?" the dulcet of Hoshi's voice was a nice countertenor to it.

"What?!" Trip focused on the worried faces of Jon and Hoshi.

"Just wondering if everything was fine,"Archer was looking at him intently, "You seemed to be miles away."

"No, no, I'm fine, Trip responded automatically, passing a hand over his face, feeling the starting stubble of his beard. Goddam it! He was at the end of his hair growth suppressant. And he'd hesitated to apply a new dose before they left, too. Now, he'd have to deal with his face itching the whole time. No food, no stretching his legs, and his beard itching. This was turning out to be a trip for the ages.

"Something bothering you?" Archer asked.

Yeah, something was bothering him alright. His beard was growing. He turned to look at the grey surface outside the shuttle, the water still sploshing around. T'Pol said the Eyaeio whatever she called it couldn't digest the shuttle. He got up to look out the window again, craning his neck to try and see. It was alive? She said a life form. She also said it couldn't digest them. What did she mean by that? To digest them it would have to eat them first... - -

"Holy shit!" He yelled out loud in the tight habitacle

"What?!" Archer came to see over his shoulder. "What's going on?!" He looked all around, peering into the darkness. The shuttle's angle didn't allow for much to be seen. At least the water was receding and the shuttle wasn't moving so much.

"Its alive!" Trip said.

"What's alive? What are you seeing?!" Archer kept looking to where Trip had looked, trying to see for himself. Hoshi had moved to the other porthole and she too was staring into the darkness outside.

"It's a life form!" Trip exclaimed. It was difficult to let them know without revealing too much. "We're in a life form!" He repeated to the nonplussed stares of his companions. All of a sudden what T'Pol had said was making all the sense in the world.

Archer whirled on him "What?! How do you know?!" he stopped, staring hard outside, "No! It's just rocks. Can't you see! There's all kind of crevaces, like volcanic rock of something." His chief engineer must have lost control of his senses, how could he say this thing was alive from what they were looking at?!

"It's alive!" Trip was shaking his head 'no'. "It's called the Eyaeio -"

Archer thought for sure he'd gone crazy. The eeya-eeya-o? Trip must have had a mental break-down. Even though they were not in a desert and the temperature in the shuttle was fine. Perhaps he just didn't react well to -

Catching the eloquent stares of his companions, Trip quickly went on, "I'm not crazy! It's true! T'Pol told me!" There, he said it.

Archer was squinting at him, "What do you mean T'Pol told you?! Did you contact her?!" He looked at the command console, checked that the communication panel was still not activated, came back to squinting at Trip. If Trip had been hailing her, he would have seem him, heard him. What in the blazes was going on? Was the engineer delusional now?

Trip sighed. There'd be no other way. "Well, you know..." he started, hoping the Captain would sort it out himself. Archer knew he had a bond with T'Pol but the Captain didn't fully understand. He thought of it much like a GPS, a marker that allowed T'Pol to keep tabs on him. And in a way Trip wanted him to keep thinking that. He didn't want to spill the beans about exactly what the bond was. If Starfleet clued in that two of its most senior officers were in secret communication - what would the old desk-bound gizzers make out of it - chief engineer on Enterprise open book of secrets for Vulcan spy - he could just imagine.

Archer looked at Trip in confusion. What was he supposed to know? But something was gnawing at him, something he knew but couldn't quite put his finger on. The knowledge was there, secure in a corner of his mind... the same corner that thought of Hoshi as an offworlder. The realization hit him with the force of a blow "...the marital bond...?" he whispered like a question. He wasn't even sure that he knew what it was but the words came of their own accord, as if it was something he'd learned at his mother's knee.

Trip nodded once. He'd seen in Archer's face that the knowledge came from far away. Surak must have told him. Jon had simply never connected the dots.

Hoshi was looking at them, not saying anything. Did the Captain really think she couldn't hear him? She was close to T'Pol in hearing acuity - within Human parameters, mind you. Her studies in Vulcan had exposed her to the concept of a marital bond but she'd never really thought about it. At least not thought it was more than the Human kind. But based on what Trip was saying... And the Captain's reaction...

Did the two of them have some secret channel where they could talk to each other? And Trip didn't talk, so it must be telepathic. And everything T'Pol heard, he heard...?

A sudden surge of embarrassment washed over her. Did that mean Trip knew everything she told T'Pol? She felt a rush of dizziness sweep over her. All those late nights in the mess hall, where she'd confided to T'Pol about Malcolm. Trip knew too? She'd never live it down. Some of what she said was pretty graphic. It didn't bother her that T'Pol knew about some of her lover's - ahem - peculiarities, but it was something else that his best friend knew too. Somehow she felt traitorous about that. She couldn't undo the damage, but she'd never tell T'Pol anything private again.

She turned her back to both men, acting as if she was looking outside the window. What did Trip know about her? How much did he know about her own... hum... idiosyncracies. She watched her reflection looking at her against the dark backdrop. What did it matter in the end? She was no longer the young woman Archer plucked for his crazy adventures. Her crewmates already knew so much about her. This did not even compare to having her mind stripped away by the Xindi. It was nothing, better forgotten. She'd put it out of her mind, keep acting as if it didn't happen.

She turned back to the men. "So what does it want with us?" she asked, working hard at acting normal.

Trip looked as if she'd just reminded him of something he'd forgotten to mention. "It's trying to digest us," he said.

"Oh," Hoshi unconsciously brought both her hands to her mouth.

"What?!" Archer whirled on Trip. "What do you mean it's trying to digest us?!"

The engineer shrugged. "Well, it's alive and we're inside it... It ate us. The liquid outside, these are gastric juices."

"Ah!" Hoshi exclaimed.

Archer looked hard at the liquid beading on the windows. "How much time before that stuff eats through the hull?"

Hoshi looked at him round-eyed. That's what he was thinking to ask?!

"I don't know," the engineer shrugged. "If I could get a sample, have access to the lab on Enterprise, I could tell you. But there's nothing here that we can use, and I'm certainly not going to open the door to get a sample."

"Then ask T'Pol!" Archer countered.

Trip sighed in irritation, "That's not how it works! It's not as if I can communicate with her whenever I want to. She has to initiate contact. It takes a lot of energy for her and I have no idea when I'll talk to her next." And that was assuming she even knew the answer...

Hoshi felt relieved. If that was the case, perhaps Trip wasn't in on more private information than she was comfortable sharing. She carefully examined the ceiling. On the other hand, the whole thing might soon be a moot point...

"Perhaps it won't be able to eat through," she hazarded, "after all, the hull is built to withstand the pressure of space. It might be too thick."

"We have to assume it can and it will," Archer replied, dismissing Hoshi's question as wishful thinking, "We're not going to just sit here and wait to find out."

"But," Hoshi rejoined, too used to Archer's reactions to let him shut her down, "if this thing can't eat through the hull, what happens then?"

The men looked at each other speechlessly, each unwilling or unable to finish the thought.

"It gets expelled, right?" Hoshi kept aligning the links of her reasoning.

That drew a chuckle from Trip.

Archer glared at him.

"Well, it's kind of funny," Trip pointed out, "to think that we could end up...," he chuckled again.

"Talk about being in the crapper!" Hoshi added with a chuckle of her own.

That drew a frank laugh from Trip and another look of irritation from the Captain.

"We're not going to end up anywhere other than out," Archer cut them off, "Now let's start thinking."

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