"Bridge to Ensign Sato," the comm buzzed with Archer's voice in Hoshi's ear and startled her out of a very pleasant dream. Why was it always those that got interrupted? Sleepiness began to dissipate and profound irritation set in. She'd been enjoying herself far too much to deal with anything anyone on the bridge would have to say. She scrabbled around one-handed, hitting the appropriate button a little sooner than she had expected, in the middle of an inappropriate response, specifically: "Damn it to hell! Go fuck yourself, you sleep-disturbing bastard. Go ahead, sir."
"Say again, Hoshi?"
She had said it in Japanese, apparently, or perhaps in crude but passable Kreetassan, which was probably for the best. "Go ahead, sir." She was reasonably certain it was English this time, and that it sounded less irritated.
"We need you out here."
"Yes, sir." This was obviously going to be the extremely early start to a fabulous day, she thought.
"It sounds like a distress call," Hoshi was saying several minutes later. Awakened very early since Crewman Lewis hadn't been able to make heads or tails of the transmission, her brain was still coagulating. She made a mental note to ream Lewis out for failing to have her unique abilities and thereby costing her precious sleep. "I'll need a little time to make sure," was all she said out loud. Listening to the unfamiliar words, she went into a half-trance of sorts. Her mind worked efficiently and without prodding, which was good. This way, everything but her ears and her linguistic skills could go safely back to sleep. Sentence structures and possible derivations ticked through her head, relating this newest language to all the others in her considerable repetoire. "Hey, wait a minute! That is Klingon! Granted, it's a dialect that should be dead..." Her brain was a computer, clicking over more information by the second. The recorded voice was definitely feminine, but very gravelly. It sounded Klingon enough.
"Hoshi?" Captain Archer looked bemused. "Klingons don't send distress calls, any more than Vulcans crack jokes. If that's what this is, it's not just the dialect that's unusual." T'Pol, sitting at her station with typical poise, did not even show that she had heard.
"It's not a distress call. It's a warning," Hoshi explained. "In a dead language, of sorts. And the placement of adverbials..." She thanked her lucky stars that a Klingon classical scholar had recently made edifying contributions to the Linguistics Database in exchange for Hoshi's help translating ancient Greek. Linguistics, let alone Classics, seemed to her an unlikely field for a Klingon, but then, what did she know?
"How did it get all the way out here, then?"
"My field of expertise falls somewhat short of determining that, sir."
"Well, at least tell me what it says?"
"I'll try sir, but this is a dead language, or rather dialect, at least it's supposed to be... that I'm hearing spoken for the first time." Taking a calming breath, Hoshi allowed herself to continue. "They've encountered... something... The upshot is that they lost a crewman, the engines failed, and a bunch of supplies disappeared. The 'something' could have been along the lines of 'spatial anomaly,' but I can't be positive and they shouldn't have had a word for that at the time Klingon was spoken in this form; It's roughly the equivalent of Latin. And I'm not even going try the ship's UT, it's been completely haywire since last night when Trip spilled..." she shut up, not wanting to incriminate him any further. Captain Archer seemed preoccupied enough that her slip didn't matter.
"Still not typical Klingon behavior. Set a course, Travis. We're going to look for survivors," Archer said, getting such a look of determination that not even T'Pol contradicted him immediately beyond a subtle shift of her eyebrows and a statement about the Vulcan Science Directorate hanging obviously on the tip of her tongue. Mayweather obeyed the order without comment.
Hoshi kept a subtle eye on T'Pol. She had observed the Vulcan closely for a long enough period of time that she knew when she was just bursting to say something. Finally, some minutes after they had begun to move again at warp 2.6, the it appeared she could no longer stand it, and said in a low voice, "Are you sure this is wise, captain? Whatever disabled the engines of those alleged Klingons could still be there. Not to mention the fact that the Vulcan Science Directorate..."
"Oh, please, T'Pol! We all know that the Vulcan Science directorate has its head up its..." Hoshi coughed loudly, not desiring to hear T'Pol's take on unnecessary vulgarity on the bridge, just as the ship shuddered and the flowing stars appeared to jerk erratically.
Suddenly worried, Archer pushed the comm button. "Trip, what's going on down there?" The sound of a mercifully small explosion greeted him, followed by the chief engineer's cursing and the unmistakable sound of a fire extinguisher.
Finally Trip responded. " Cap'n, I was just about to ask you the same thing. This may sound a bit crazy, sir, but equipment keeps disappearing, I thought we were gonna have to dump the..." another small explosion ended his sentence prematurely.
"Perhaps he spilled bourbon all on the warp core yesterday, too," Hoshi chuckled to herself.
"Drop out of warp immediately!" shouted the captain, but just at that moment, a ripple of distortion wracked the Enterprise. It seemed to buckle the confines of space as did the anomalies in the Delphic Expanse. And this one seemed to engulf Hoshi, obscuring her from view as sparks and smoke burst from her console. Even when the anomaly seemed to have cleared the ship, there was not a hair left of their translator.
T'Pol, in the Vulcan equivalent of cursing a blue streak, stated calmly, "This is not a desirable situation."