A/N: Hellooo! Here we go, Malcolm is at it again with the dialogues. When I'm through with him, he's gonna be an extrovert! Just kidding. The long dialogues will come to an end soon, though... for better or worse? Muhahaha, get ready for some action very soon.

For the time being, though, help out a non-native speaker, please: what are the silver/grey pins on the crew's collars called? The individual thingies that together make up the rank insignia. You know, Hoshi and Travis have one X on their collars, Malcolm has two Xs, etc... Help? And while we're at it: Casual reminder that you lovely reviewers are very much invited to write me about weird grammar and spelling mistakes. I'm happy to learn!

STRINGS ATTACHED

CHAPTER FOUR

Almost no sleep, a malfunctioning Armoury department with clueless subordinates, a cold cup of tea, a huge pile of tasks he, as Chief of Security and temporary replacement for both Sub-Commander and Commander, had to get done as soon as possible, and an impatient Captain waiting for his report... All of this and it was only oh-nine-hundred.

Honestly, Malcolm's day could have started better.

After a night of tossing and turning in his bed and alternating between wondering how to get Trip out of trouble and fantasising about throwing him out of an airlock, getting out of bed didn't improve things. He hadn't even drunk his tea when Armoury first called. Then, elbow deep in the electronics of his malfunctioning sensor arrays, the calls and notifications had piled up, until at last the Captain himself had hailed and asked whether or not he planned to drop by as requested.

If there was anything Malcolm Reed hated more than not finishing his tea in the morning, it was not finishing his tea because he was too late for a meeting with the Captain. A meeting he was dreading anyway, since the way Archer's words had caused him to completely lose his mind yesterday weighted heavily on his conscience. Here he had been wondering if the Captain had gone insane, and the next moment he let his own jealousy cloud his judgement. Whatever Trip's reasons had been for not telling him the truth about T'Pol's stay on Tellar, he had probably managed to blow the whole thing out of proportion.

Malcolm had spent the night staring at the ceiling and cringing at his behaviour. Obviously, there was a reason why Reeds didn't start relationships on duty. Calm and collected had been his credo when he had finally given up on sleep, but apparently this day had other plans for him.

As he stumbled into the turbolift, thus, out of breath but trying to appear decent in front of his fellow crew members, he wasn't in the mood to chat. Pointedly, he ignored the three science officers that had whispered when he jumped into the lift last minute and stared at him wide-eyed, now.

Then, a movement caught his attention. One of the younger scientists, Malcolm didn't know her name, elbowed her friend in the ribs with gusto. He wasn't quick enough to look away in time before meeting the poor victim's eyes. His English upbringing forbade him to ignore her now, so he smiled apologetically, even though there was nothing to apologise about.

(Malcolm loved the English culture dearly, but sometimes he thought that his ancestors had gone a little bit too far with the whole awkward-politeness-thing. He'd really love to at least once not apologise when someone else bumped into him, or not send an order and then reread it again and again, agonising whether it was too friendly, or not friendly enough. Especially on a ship full of obnoxious Americans, who didn't think twice about such things.)

"Lieutenant Reed," the blonde woman stammered, clearly uncomfortable as she held her aching side. Maybe she had some English ancestors as well. "Excuse us... but.. is it true?"

He smiled at her encouragingly, when in reality he just wanted her to shut up while he tried not to pant from his dash to the lift. "Beg you pardon, Miss?"

The woman looked at her friends, who only shrugged. "We heard about Commander Tucker. Is it true?"

Talking about obnoxious Americans...

Malcolm sighed slowly. Of course, rumours had started to spread quickly – there weren't a lot of places you could disappear to in deep space (airlock?, Malcolm's brain provided helpfully). Malcolm and Hess had been careful when they examined the work station, but Engineering, with its cramped spaces and open work stations, was hardly a good place to conduct a delicate investigation. The remaining Engineers had definitely listened on the Security teams' conversations and spun their own tales by now.

"I can't discuss the Commander's absence freely, unfortunately."

The scientists' eyes went wide.

"So it is true?" The young one asked, clasping a hand over her mouth. Malcolm thought that her reaction was a little bit exaggerated, given the fact that this was neither the first time Trip had been confined to quarters nor was it due to the loudest argument he had ever had.

The man among them whistled. "A Commander on the brig, that doesn't happen often."

Focussing on the ginger Ensign, Malcolm furrowed his brow. Why would they talk about the brig? Trip was confined to quarters, which was an embarrassing but common punishment. He had seen him just yesterday, nothing had changed, unless Malcolm wouldn't have been informed.

… unfortunately, information hadn't been flowing all that easily, lately. Worry settled in his stomach as he got the distinct feeling that something was going on.

Luckily, the turbolift arrived at the bridge's deck just then and spared Malcolm any further conversation. He hurried out of the lift and decidedly ignored a whispered utterance about whether or not fraternisation rules still applied after a dishonourable discharge (they didn't), which ended in a fit of excited giggles. From all three scientists.

Airlock, he thought grimly as his mind's eye conjured all sorts of scenarios that might explain why the ship was buzzing with rumours about Trip in the brig. He would have been informed. Hell, he would have been the one to conduct the arrest.

A mixture of frustration and fear crawled up Malcolm's spine as the door to the bridge opened. He needed to find out if anything had happened to Trip, if he was alright, and reporting to the Captain right now definitely wasn't what he wanted to d-

"Lieutenant," Archer's voice cut through his thoughts just when the bridge's door swished open. He snapped to attention out of reflex, meeting his Captain's eyes without so much as looking at the others on the bridge. "In my Ready Room."

From the corner of his eye, he saw Hoshi looking at him worriedly, but he quickly crossed the almost empty bridge to follow the Captain, who had already turned away. When Malcolm made it to the Ready Room, Archer had taken his seat behind the heavy wooden desk, but didn't offer Malcolm to sit as he usually did.

Just yesterday Malcolm had been relieved to meet the old, easy-going Jonathan Archer again in this room. The man in front of him now was the exact opposite – glaring, brooding, and tense. There was a stack of PADDs on his desk, just like on Malcolm's, and a plate full of barely touched breakfast food.

Wordlessly, Archer reached for the PADD on top of the pile and handed it to Malcolm, who gladly took it. He hadn't been told to stand at ease and had begun to feel ridiculous.

Something happened, Malcolm's instincts screamed. Something bad.

The PADD showed a page of text with a few lines highlighted. Guessing that this was a prompt, he began to read, but Archer cut through his concentration: "At around twenty-two-hundred yesterday night, Mister Tucker received an encoded message. Soon after, internal comms were forced to reboot. This morning, we found almost all external sensor arrays underperforming or even inoperative."

Malcolm felt panic rise in his chest as he processed the words – an existential fear for Trip, for what had happened tonight. A panic that he was too late, that something had already happened to Trip and he hadn't even noticed.

Holding onto his professionalism, Malcolm made sure that the hand that was holding the PADD was steady, before he raised his gaze. "You suspect a correlation."

Archer looked at him closely as if sizing up his reaction. "We have confronted him last night, as soon as we discovered the reboot."

Malcolm nodded numbly and bought time by pretending to read the report in his hand, when in truth the letters before his eyes were swimming. The next seconds were crucial, and he tried to think through this options at light speed. With his head full of pictures of beaten up, injured, or even dead Chief Engineers, thinking straight wasn't that easy.

The scientists had talked about the brig, he remembered. That would be logical – Archer had found a reason to up the punishment. The brig was bad, but it was better than Sickbay. Or an airlock. Or one of the other many, many other possibilities his brain had just come up with. Breathing became a little bit easier. The brig was safe. The brig meant that Trip was fine. Alive.

With his nerves already high-strung, he decided to concentrate on the last part and chose a strategy that would have made his father proud: attack as the best form of defence. Slowly, Malcolm put the PADD back where it came from.

"Why wasn't I informed about any of this?" he asked, stiffly, directing all his contempt for this situation into this question. He had a right to know, really – he was Chief of Security and acting Commander. Confronting a suspect, a former Commander nonetheless, without him wasn't proper.

Archer sighed and looked at him intensely. "I have decided to take you off Security."

"Sir!" Malcolm felt his control slipping. Had he been right that Archer didn't trust him enough? "If this is about our conversation yesterday-"

Impatiently, Archer stopped him with a wave of his hand. "You were right in setting me straight yesterday. Malcolm, I need you as my Second right now. There is a lot to do; I need you to cover for two Commanders and we're probably in the middle of a system failure."

Malcolm, dumbstruck, barely registered the sad tone Archer's voice gained as he said the last sentence. "I don't understand. The current situation clearly warrants the Sub-Commander's early return."

"No," Archer answered him gloomily. "T'Pol sent the encoded message to Trip."

Malcolm really, really wanted to believe that this particular piece of information didn't cause the ground beneath his feet to shake, but it did. Badly, so. He took a deep breath – calm and collected, he told himself. Calm and collected and not jumping to conclusions.

"Sir, I think you have to start at the beginning."

There was a pause when nobody talked, but Archer watched him wearily. Then, he finally nodded and stood up, arms interlocked at his back. Malcolm let go of a breath he had been holding – apparently, he had just passed the test. Archer had let him known that he had reasons to question his loyalties, and when Malcolm had focussed his attention on his job and the ship, he had proven to the Captain that he was indeed loyal.

This was important, since rank obviously didn't automatically entail trust for the Captain anymore – but really, what other option did Archer have but him? Lieutenant Hess would surely make a fine Chief Engineer, but apart from Malcolm, no other Lieutenant had commanding experience or was well-acquainted enough with Enterprise's affairs. When Malcolm had managed to meet his expectations today, a huge load must have fallen off the Captain's mind – his demeanour had changed just now, as well.

Archer begun to pace the room as he recounted the events of yesterday night, gesturing wildly.

"I already informed you that we received an encoded message for Trip yesterday night. Since he is cut off from external contacts in confinement, the message was rerouted to communications. We found out that the encoded message came from Tellar Prime. Now, all external sensors are malfunctioning." Archer threw him a look. "We found a pattern: as chance would have it, Trip sent an encoded message to Tellar just hours before somehow, my oxygen was turned off."

Malcolm stared at the Captain. He needed to get his hands on these reports. "You think, he and T'Pol ...?"

"Of course they are working together, I should have seen it earlier. They're involved, after all," Archer shook his head with as much contempt as Malcolm felt at the thought. "He and T'Pol and at least one other person on this ship. Someone must have informed him about the communique and then covered their tracks. Internal comms was forced to reboot just about an hour later. It's not possible to reconstruct any internal communication paths from yesterday night."

Mutiny, Malcolm thought numbly. Archer was going for a mutiny charge against Trip. Being the loyal soldier that he was, the word horrified him even more than yesterday's 'murder' had.

"What happened to Mister Tucker?" He finally dared to ask, with a steady voice that was only slightly raspy – given the fact that he felt his throat contracting and cutting off the air in his lungs, Malcolm thought this was an impressive feat.

The Captain leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms, but the corner of his mouth twitched a little bit. "Brig."

Although it wasn't really an answer to relax, Malcolm still felt a little bit of the dread melting away from his mind which almost made him dizzy.

A brig arrest warranted a certain range of charges. Like treason, murder, or mutiny. Finally, Malcolm had the opportunity to make up ground in the conversation. He tried to stay calm, as calm as he could. "You're charging him with mutiny."

"Think about it, Malcolm! "Archer was excited now and pushed himself off from the wall to start pacing again. "It makes sense! He never tried to actually kill me – he just needed me incapacitated so that he'd have command."

In the matter of nanoseconds, the atmosphere in the room and between the two of them had changed drastically. Just minutes ago, Malcolm had had to be careful with every word he used, and now the Captain had switched from brooding to excited, almost exhilarated, and let him in on his thoughts.

Walking around his desk and strolling through the room, Archer unfurled his theory. "If you would have found me unconscious in my chambers, T'Pol and Trip would rise in rank automatically. They'd have enough time to change the oxygen settings back to normal in the night. No one would have been any wiser. He only forgot about Porthos."

"Sir..." Malcolm said slowly, unsure about this schizophrenic change in character and the crazy theory that had completely replaced the old one – as if he hadn't confined his second officer and former best friend for it not even 48 hours ago... whatever was going on with the Captain, Malcolm realised, he believed every word that he said.

The Captain noticed Malcolm's subdued reaction, and became defensive. "He mutinied before. It's important to remember that he's capable of it, Malcolm."

Wetting his lips, Malcolm shifted on his seat uncomfortably. He didn't like thinking back at the encounter with the Xindi nest and what happened afterwards. "That was different, Captain."

"He's pointed a gun at me again, since then," Archer argued. "I think they had planned it with T'Pol on board. That's why he was so mad at me when I sent her away. If she had taken command, she could have protected him from accusations."

Malcolm wondered for a moment if he should argue against the Captain's theory. To think that Trip and T'Pol would plot against the Captain to take over Enterprise was ludicrous, though he had to admit that the pattern between encoded messages and the failure of highly sensible systems was weird. He chose to play along for the time being – he hadn't come up with another theory so far, and as long as he couldn't disprove the Captain, all arguing would seem suspicious. Malcolm needed to stay in Archer's good graces, otherwise he wouldn't be able to help Trip at all.

"What will happen now?" he asked therefore, steering the conversation back to the necessary next steps.

"I've already set a course for the Sol System and informed the Admiral last night. We'll either have a court martial when we arrive, or job interviews for various high-paying positions... Or both."

Malcolm took a deep breath. So Archer aborted their exploring mission to return to Earth, where a court martial would decide on Trip's case. As bad as that sounded, Malcolm felt a wave of relief flooding through him – a court martial meant that at least, Archer was willing to apply Starfleet regulations and let someone else decide on the matter objectively. Given the circumstances, objectivity was Trip's best shot at getting out of this mess.

Getting back to Earth would take some time, time Malcolm desperately needed to gather evidence and prepare. It wasn't the best scenario, but it certainly wasn't the worst – if Archer had announced the trial to the Admiral, he had to refrain from throwing Trip out of an airlock. Given the current situation, he counted this as an improvement.

"How fast can we go with the systems in the middle of reconstruction?"

"Engineering said we can't get her faster than 2.0."

Malcolm frowned and felt the hairs on the back of his neck tingle. Trip had estimated that the ship was already moving at Warp 2.2, and even though Trip was an idiot who managed to get himself into trouble all the time, he was always right about his engines. Always.

Archer sighed, wistfully, when he saw Malcolm's frown. "It'll be a while. Three weeks, maybe."

"Is it safe?" Going maximum speed with half of the systems malfunctioning was far from Malcolm's definition of safe. With external sensors down and the weapon system unreliable, they were sitting ducks for every vessel looking for prey.

"We'll need to get as many systems back online as possible." Archer agreed, and Malcolm barely managed to swallow a comment about such an inconvenience, what with their Chief Engineer in the brig and all. "I'll keep supervising the overhaul. You're in charge of reversing the damage he did to the sensor arrays."

...Allegedly, Malcolm added in thoughts. Of all crazy accusations against Trip, the idea that he'd purposely damage his ship was by far the absurdest.

The Captain handed him a PADD. It was showing a complicated blueprint of... Malcolm didn't even recognise what it was showing. "Sir, with all due respect, Lieutenant Hess would be much better qualified."

When the Captain didn't answer, Malcolm looked up, only to find Archer watching him with eyes narrowed to slits. "Do you think we can trust her, Malcolm?"

Malcolm groaned silently. Right, the Captain suspected at least one other crew member to be in cahoots with Trip and T'Pol. The paranoia was spreading across the ship – this was exactly what Malcolm needed to prevent. "Lieutenant Hess has proven herself to be very trustworthy. She has been beyond helpful."

Obviously, Archer wasn't convinced that easily, and for a second Malcolm wondered if he had lost the little bit of trust he had managed to gain back. "Yes, very helpful. Maybe she gave us the run-around in the technical matters. And she would be perfectly capable of conducting the systems' failure without leaving a trace."

Archer launched into motion and turned to Malcolm. "Brief your Second on the case. Someone you trust." Malcolm opened his mouth to protest, but Archer cut him right off with a gesture. "We need a list of possible suspects until we arrive at Earth. Until then, confine all of Beta to their quarters."

"Sir!" Malcolm exhaled in shock. "We can't confine a whole shift!"

The Captain's brow furrowed, but he wasn't really looking at the other person in the room. He was miles away, oblivious to his acting Commander's dismay. "Beta had had shift when the message came in. Maybe it's someone from Communications. They knew about it first..."

"This is paranoia, Captain!" The words left him before he had a chance to think about it, before he had even asked permission to speak freely. Malcolm felt his insides churn at the insolence he was showing – but there wasn't any other way left. He needed to stop this before it went too far. "We can't risk losing a third of the crew because of a hunch. You're being paranoid."

His clear words had gotten through, for better or worse. The Captain had finally stopped his pacing and looked at him bewildered, at a loss for words for once. There were circles under his eyes, Malcolm realised suddenly. The man probably hadn't slept a lot last night. He knew that he hadn't slept a lot the night before, either.

"Yesterday you asked me to keep the ship's safety at first priority," Malcolm said slowly, carefully, as if talking to a wild animal, "so I'm telling you now, Captain: you're jumping to conclusions. Let's just stick to the facts."

Archer was listening intensely. His hands, which had stopped in mid-air in a wild gesture, slowly sunk to his sides. He looked at Malcolm like a drowning man, and Malcolm felt a wave of sympathy for this man who obviously didn't know who to trust any more.

"What are the facts, Lieutenant?"

Oh.

He had walked right into that one. Swallowing, Malcolm congratulated himself for trapping himself in a corner. He tried to think about the matter without any personal feelings involved; it was difficult.

"The facts are, that the messages between Mister Tucker and T'Pol are suspicious under the current circumstances." – and wow, that just felt as if he had thrown Trip in the brig himself – "Everything else might still be an unfortunate series of coincidences."

Archer took a deep breath and nodded once, slowly. Apparently, he had gotten a grip on himself again. He sat down on his chair heavily. "You don't believe there is a third person involved."

I don't believe there is anyone involved, Malcolm wanted to scream. Instead, he ran a hand through his hair and shrugged helplessly. "I think that we can't spare anyone, given the current status of the ship."

"I want that list."

He could live with that. Especially if it meant not losing a third of the crew as well as the security personnel needed to guard them. One crisis averted, he thought grimly. One at a time, Reed.

"Has Ensign Sato tried to decipher the messages?" Directing the Captain's attention away from the beta shift before he could change his mind, Malcolm tried to hide the fact that encoding Trip and T'Pol's messages was important for more than one reason... at least to him.

"No," Archer mumbled slowly, looking at his hands in embarrassment. "I wasn't sure who to trust..."

Malcolm felt for him, really – admitting to falling for your own paranoia was hard. Knowing that he had found a way to perfectly well justify his personal need to encode the messages didn't help with his own embarrassment. "I will talk to her. It will clear things up."

One way or the other.

"Let's go home," Archer concluded, and smiled that sad little smile Malcolm had always hated – the one he used when there was hope at the end of tunnel, but the tunnel was a nightmare to travel through, and the Captain didn't know how to find the way.

So, instead of looking at that smile, Malcolm dropped his gaze on the PADD in his hand. "I will start with the sensors at once."

"Dismissed, Lieutenant Commander."

Malcolm turned around to leave, not looking forward to the next few hours. Maybe he could find an alibi to get to the brig, though, and see Trip.

"Malcolm," Archer called after him as he walked through the door, and he turned around slightly. "Thank you."

The door closed neatly, saving Malcolm from having to reply. He felt like a traitor for admitting it, but the Captain's words, despite all the current drama and lies, meant the world him.

With external sensors and telemetry underperforming, Enterprise was basically blind. Malcolm didn't like it one bit, and as he watched his fellow crew members whispering silently in the mess, he was sure that they weren't comfortable either.

When the crew realised they were moving again but without sensors, the Chief Engineer's absence had changed from a rumour into full gossip. Anna Hess had commed him earlier, asking what the hell she was supposed to tell all these people that asked her about Trip. Moreover, since Archer didn't want the crew to know that they were heading back to Earth, still fearing that a third conspirator might jump to action if he or she knew, the crew was basically forced to make up their own stories, and with the experiences of the Expanse still fresh on everyone's minds, only few of them spelled out fine.

Malcolm hated the low morale on board. Enterprise had always been a vessel pushed by humanity's curiosity and optimism – lately, however, they were falling short of these ideals. Drastically.

Luckily, Hoshi entered the mess and headed for Malcolm's table just before he had time to delve deeper into these depressing thoughts.

"Lieutenant." Even though her features were tense and the smile on her lips was purely professional, she was one of the few people that usually managed to lighten Malcolm's spirits and bleary situations. He needed her now more than ever.

"Hoshi," he greeted back and offered her a chair and lifted the lids on both of their plates in a silent prompt to eat.

Thankfully, when he had asked her for an early lunch after emerging from the Captain's Ready Room, she had immediately agreed to meet him. With the room less crowded than during lunch time, Malcolm had been able to grab a table far at the end of the room, a little bit distanced from the others. It was as much inconspicuous privacy as he could find, right now.

Hoshi had sat down and watched Malcolm carefully. She probably worried about Trip, Malcolm gathered, ever since she had witnessed the Captain's harsh reaction in Sickbay and heard all the rumours spreading. Trip and Hoshi were good friends, almost sharing a sibling-like relationship, and being kept out of the loop must have been hard on her.

"What's going on, Malcolm?" she asked suddenly, when Malcolm didn't say anything. "Do you know anything about Trip?"

Malcolm suppressed a flinch and a smile at her straight-forwardness. In some regards, Hoshi and Trip were so much alike – they didn't define themselves as Starfleet officers per se, but as specialists within Starfleet. They were willing to adhere to conduct only so far as it didn't interfere with what they really deemed important: their passions, their loved ones. When they had believed Captain Archer had died destroying the Xindi weapon, Hoshi had spent no second worrying before hugging a shell-shocked Trip – Malcolm had been beyond jealous about their ability to prioritise emotions and their jobs...Well, and about hugging Trip. But that was different story.

Malcolm pondered on his answer. With the Captain's paranoia taking over the ship and the room still full of ears and eyes, he needed to be careful. "I fear that Chef won't get rid of his pie anytime soon."

Hoshi locked her eyes with his, alerted. "So the rumours are true."

Behind her, two crew members cleared their plates and finally got up. Listlessly picking at her food, she waited until they were out of earshot. Malcolm had expected an outspoken reaction, some sort of surprised exclamation, but Hoshi was as calm and collected as she ever was. Malcolm could almost hear the cogwheels in her head turning as she looked at him.

"I honestly don't really understand what he did in the first place." She said finally. It wasn't a question, or an observation, or even a prompt. It was a test. She was seizing him up, he realised suddenly, prying for his reaction. What side are you on, Reed?

Considering what he was going to ask her, he took a small leap of faith – one that could mean the world or not make any difference at all, depending on who listened in. "I'm sure the Captain knows what he's doing." Because I don't know what the hell he's up to.

Something flickered across the linguist's features, but Malcolm wasn't quick enough to decipher it. She didn't say anything else, and Malcolm decided to never, ever play poker against Hoshi Sato.

"Actually I need you to do something," he finally said.

Only her eyebrow shot up. Absent-mindedly, Malcolm wondered why no one had yet offered Hoshi a job in Security. They always needed code-crackers.

"I need you to send a message to the Sub-Commander."

"To T'Pol? On Tellar Prime?"

"The Captain told me all about the messages between the Sub-Commander and Trip. You'll be able to locate her?"

She nodded, brows furrowed. "I hope the communication devices work properly. What's the content?"

Malcolm swallowed. Making sure that no one was close enough to hear them, he lowered his voice. "Tell her we're headed towards Earth for a court martial."

This, finally, made Hoshi's facade crack a little bit. "What?"

"...and we won't wait for her to return."

For a few seconds, Hoshi and Malcolm just stared at each other, before she dropped her gaze and leaned back in her chair. "This is not an order from the Captain, is it?"

Malcolm took a deep breath. This was it. "No. It's a personal favour."

"Now he distrusts both of them?" Hoshi's eyes narrowed and she crooked her neck to the side.

Her ability to find patterns obviously went beyond language systems. Malcolm made a mental note to think of ways of shielding her from Section 31's hunger for talented recruits. If the Section got its hands on her and taught her some manipulation methods, they were all doomed.

And speaking of manipulation methods... "The encryptions are suspicious, you'll have to grant him that much."

An air of annoyance crossed Hoshi's features. "He wouldn't let me have a look at it."

"He changed his mind." Malcolm pulled a PADD out of his pockets and handed it to Hoshi, who grabbed it eagerly. "Can you do it?"

"Sure. Trip's message will be easy, he probably used one of our own encryption codes."

Malcolm felt a strange pressure in his chest and tried to sound as nonchalantly as possible. "Please run the data by me first."

Eyes on the PADD's screen, Hoshi allowed herself a small smile. "Protecting the Captain from overworking himself?"

His chest was still constricting painfully as he kept pushing the dark, distracting thoughts and feelings away that had begun scratching at the surface again, but his next words were still spoken in utter earnestness: "It's my job to protect everyone on this ship, Hoshi."

With her attention drawn to the PADD and the encryption, they spent the rest of their half-hearted lunch in silence. When they parted ways outside of the mess, just when the bulk of their fellow crew members flocked in, Malcolm felt light-headed and worn out.

Of course, as soon as he was alone, his carefully constructed control began to crack. He had been holding on to it for too long today. Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw his old friend, the jealousy, casually leaned against the grey wall of the corridor he was passing, laughing quietly and whetting its claws. His stomach clenched. Trip and T'Pol had been sending messages to each other and Trip hadn't told Malcolm. Not even when he had confronted him about her situation on Tellar Prime...

"Don't go there," he murmured without voice, trying to regain his composure. He had promised himself to not let the jealousy cloud his mind again. Asking Hoshi to decipher the message was a perfectly logical next step with all that was going on. The fact that it also fed into his private quest was a coincidence. And why wouldn't he try to gain as much intel as possible?

So where were we?, the jealousy asked, draping its arm around his shoulders. Ah, yes. Secret messages of star-crossed lovers. Delicious...

"Airlock," Malcolm muttered to himself. He was really beginning to see the appeal.

-tbc-

R&R, please!