Chapter 12: Plausible deniability

Trip scrubbed his hands over his eyes and tried to make sense of the specs he'd just been sent from Jupiter station. They'd been back almost a month now and it had been an insane whirlwind of memorials, public appearances, media appearances, school visits, functions, and debriefings. In between all that, Enterprise was being repaired and planning was in progress for a refit as well. For all their talk about what they were going to do when they got back to Earth, it turned out the actual answer to that question was - more work, lots more work.

He'd managed to go and see his parents for a weekend. He had hoped to take T'Pol, but she had been called into the Vulcan Embassy for debriefings, seeing as she had nothing better to do. Because Vulcans don't do weekends (leisure time is illogical apparently). It had been nice to see his parents and get away from the post-expanse celebrity for a couple of days, ostensibly to relax. The reality was he'd spent most of the time reviewing plans for Enterprise and explaining to the Jupiter Station engineers all the upgrades he'd made on the fly over the past year, so they could absorb the information into the Star Fleet body of knowledge. He had to admit he was getting to the edge of strung out.

To make matters worse, time with T'Pol had been limited. It was difficult to see her outside of work because she was staying at the Vulcan Compound and he was at Starfleet. Even though they were close enough that she could probably smell him, she might as well be on Vulcan for all the time they spent together. There was, of course, work contact, where he was Commander Tucker, He Who Must Not be Touched. They were able to get the occasional meal meal together, usually in the StarFleet Officers Club, which came with the frank, unembarrassed observation from all the Starfleet alumni who'd heard about Lorian; or a cafe close to Star Fleet, which came with frank, unembarrassed observation from the public who couldn't believe their luck at seeing two senior officers from the Enterprise, particularly one of the 'Alien' ones. He had to admit what he wanted was to just get in a car with her, drive for a couple of hours until they found some nice secluded location, get a room, and not get out of bed for a week.

Things had finally come to a head earlier that day at some public appearance or other, when a dignitary (and he used the term lightly), stood at a podium and started ranting about the alien influence on Earth, and how Earth didn't need Aliens, and how Earth had saved themselves when threatened by aliens. Ironically this had all been said in front of two aliens who had risked their lives helping Enterprise save Earth. The Starfleet PR people had bustled them away muttering something about a harmless minority when T'Pol, cool as custard, mentioned that this is not the first time she has encountered prejudice since returning to Earth and many Vulcans were beginning to feel unsafe in public and relocating to the Vulcan compound. The pressure of the past year got the better of him and Trip hit the roof.

It wasn't his proudest moment, he would freely admit that, but he did manage to get a few points across that most of the crew had be feeling. Namely, that they were tired from near constant stress for a year; and grieving lost crew members; and disoriented from coming back after a year away, to a place that had changed in response to tragedy; and they all needed a break. But what they didn't need was to go to public functions, where their trusted colleagues, and friends, were subjected to prejudiced attacks. He had not phrased all this quite so politely.

The response from the collected group had been varied. T'Pol, naturally, got all emotional and raised an eyebrow; Malcolm had given one of his tight little sarcastic smiles, which was the equivalent of a round of applause for Trip, a slap on his back and a 'jolly good show' from the reserved Britt; Hoshi had had admitted quietly that she would like some leave, if that didn't inconvenience that petaQ out there (both T'Pol's eyebrows had gone up at that so Trip knew petaQ didn't translate to honourable guest or anything similar); Phlox had simply said something about human psychology in response to stress and how it was quite a fascinating study (Trip wasn't sure which humans Phlox had been talking about). The Captain had looked around at his senior staff and said he'd talk to Command about it.

The chirp of his communicator shook Trip out of his reflections. It was the Captain.

"Trip," he said. "I spoke to Command. I got all of you four days, starting Saturday. We should have a couple more weeks of work to do after that then you'll all be released for a couple of months.

Trip sighed with relief. "Thanks, Cap'n. Sorry about tossing my toys earlier."

The Captain chuckled "It needed to said, perhaps not quite in those words. You've all been pushed hard. Starfleet should have been more considerate of that." There was a small pause. "I guess you will be heading out of town?"

"Yeah, you remember Gerry Pratt, worked with us on the Warp 5 project? He's got a place a couple of hours away, up in the Redwoods near the Russian River in Sonoma. He offered it to me not long after we got back. I might just take him up on that."

There was another pause. "So, you'll be taking T'Pol with you?"

Trip was glad it wasn't a video call, because he was pretty sure his face went bright red. "Um, I'm not certain what T'Pol will be doing." Which wasn't a complete lie, because he hadn't discussed it with her yet.

The Captain just laughed. "You know Trip, it's going to be pretty hard for me to maintain plausible deniability when I've already met your son."

Trip, not sure what to say to that, just stammered and stuttered for a bit before the Captain put him out if his misery.

"It's okay Trip, Starfleet have pretty much given me discretion to waive fraternisation rules where I see fit. It's pretty obvious the two of you have had something going on for a while. That I can't figure out when it started, points to the fact that it's not impacting your working relationship. He laughed again. "I'll see you both when you get back."

Trip shook his head and terminated the call. On the plus' side at least he didn't have an awkward conversation with Captain in his future. On the downside, T'Pol was incredibly private, hopefully she wasn't too offended by the Captain knowing.

He put a quick call through to Gerry to arrange the cabin and messaged the Starfleet carpool to see if he could take a car for private use. Then he messaged T'Pol to let her know what he had set up and check she was okay with it.

Her reply was one word, "Agreed."

It was Wednesday night. He only had to get through two more days.