Chapter Five

Trip wasn't happy and wasn't afraid to show it. "Captain, I don't have time! I have blown out relays all over this ship, not to mention all of the crumpled bulkheads and the like. That's what happens when a ship gets hit with one that's four times its size! I just thank God that my engines were off line and we were dead in the water. If they hadn't been we wouldn't be here!" he huffed as he dragged his head out from under a power relay that he had just finished repairing. "I know that it wasn't anybody's fault but I've got too much to do to make time for chit chat!"

"He's right sir," Scotty chimed in from where he was kneeling on top of the warp engines. He was busy replacing crystals and tickled to have the chance to do it. Lieutenant Hess was right next to him, watching in awe. The only person she had ever seen that had this sort of hands on talent with warp engines was her own Chief Engineer.

"Try it now!" Trip called up.

Kirk sighed. That wasn't something he could deny. This Enterprise didn't even have shields to soften the blow his ship had dealt her. Fortunately he was very experienced with Starfleet Engineers and he wasn't the youngest Captain in the fleet for nothing. "I understand that. I just need to talk to you privately. Is there an out of the way repair that you can work on? I may not be an engineer, but I can hand you tools," he offered. "I wouldn't be asking this if it wasn't of the utmost importance."

"Ok, that I can do," Trip agreed. He gathered up his tools. "Hess, I'm going to check on the plasma conduits."

"Understood sir," she said and reorganized her PADD with the repair list. She wasn't at all put out about getting to know Scotty better while Trip took on the repairs in the cramped Jeffries tube.

Trip hit a comm unit on his way out of main engineering and spoke to Hoshi. "Hoshi, if anyone needs him, Captain Kirk is with me. We're going to be out of communication contact for a while in the Jeffries tube above the starboard plasma conduit so send someone down if you need either of us."

"Understood Commander," Hoshi said. She wondered why Captain Kirk was helping Commander Tucker. He wasn't an engineer.

Trip led Kirk down to the Jeffries tube and crawled in ahead of him. The shaft was a tight fit for the two men, but Trip knew just how to situate them both so as to make the best use out of their respective jobs. So he stopped Kirk at the access panel, crawled forward and then turned himself around so that he was lying down in the proper position to remove the panel before starting on his repairs.

He removed the hatch and handed it to Kirk. "Here, set that up against the wall out of the way and hand me that scanner." He pointed at the device on the top of the tool kit.

"Here you are," Kirk said. He was thankful that the best engineers were like Vulcans and able to multitask several very intricate things at once. "All right, now what do you know about Vulcans, customs and marriage practices?"

"They have arraigned marriages that are set at age seven. And it's a big insult for a person to reject their parent's choice," Trip recited. He knew that much from learning about T'Pol's betrothal and her decision to stay on the Enterprise.

"Do you know that Vulcans are touch telepaths?" Kirk asked.

"Yeah, that's why they don't like to be touched. I found that one out a while back." Trip smirked as he recalled the lecture Hoshi had read Malcolm over a bit of gossip he had tried to pass on to her over lunch. "Hand me that spanner," he said as he passed the scanner back.

"Good that gives me a starting point" Kirk said as he switched tools for the engineer. "When Vulcans are betrothed, they are brought in front of a priest and a mental link is set between the children's minds. That is the betrothal bond. Under normal conditions, the betrothal bond will become a marriage bond when the couple gets married through a deeper mind meld. Vulcans consider the bond between mates to be sacred. Interfering in someone else's bond is one of the very few offenses that can still get you executed on Vulcan."

"Oh shit, don't tell me that I'm going to get executed for telling T'Pol she shouldn't have to go back to Vulcan to get married to that guy Koss if she didn't want to!" Trip asked. He didn't let his worry extend to his repairs. He kept his hands steady and working.

Kirk laughed, "No, because you didn't try to break her bond. You just told her to go with what she wanted. I'm talking about actively interfering, like a telepath going in and trying to break a bond. The only ones allowed to break a betrothal bond are the two adults involved. No one is allowed to break a marriage bond."

"Ok, so if I'm not in trouble for messing around with T'Pol's bond to Koss, then where are you going with this?" Trip asked.

"I'm telling you this because there is another type of mating bond. It only happens to someone who is either unbonded or has a betrothal bond, not someone who has a full marriage bond. It is rare and is considered to be the most sacred type of bond that a Vulcan can have. It is called the chosen mate bond. What happens is that a spontaneous mating bond forms between two people whose minds are especially attuned to each other. If the people involved are already betrothed, the spontaneous bond will overwhelm and break the betrothal bonds on its own." Here Kirk paused. He had already seen that Tucker and T'Pol were working on a similar relationship to Spock and McCoy's. He wasn't sure that this news would go over too well. "You and T'Pol have begun to form a chosen mate bond."

That did what the imagined threat to his life had not. Commander Charles 'Trip' Tucker III stopped working.

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Captain Archer and Lt. Malcolm Reed were in the captain's ready room going over the repairs to the ship's weapons systems when Trip walked in. Or rather he stumbled in. Archer and Malcolm watched as he went directly to the maintenance hatch for the communications circuitry where Archer's secret stash of scotch was hidden. He grabbed the bottle, twisted the top off and took a large gulp before replacing the hatch. He did not however, replace the scotch. That he took with him when he went to sit down on the other side of the table from Archer next to Malcolm. "Why do these things always happen to me?" he moaned.

"What happened this time?" Malcolm asked concerned. He couldn't imagine what could have happened to Trip now. They were in the middle of repairs and he should have been too busy for any sort of accident/medical problem/female interaction that Malcolm knew to watch out for. He knew the list both from experience and the tall tales he had been told from those who wanted him to be aware of just how much a trouble magnet one particular Starfleet Engineer could be. The man had a history going back to junior high school it seemed and as the Enterprise's Armory Officer it was his job to make sure that Trip landed in as little trouble as possible.

Trip put his head down on the table. He didn't want to look anyone in the face when he told this one, not even his two closest friends. "My dad's gonna kill me. Hell, I ain't even sure my momma's gonna leave anything left for him to kill!" he moaned.

Archer, who thanks to Captain Kirk knew what was coming, started to snicker. "It isn't that bad, Trip."

"Jon, this makes getting pregnant look like a splinter!" Trip moaned before taking another swig from the bottle and setting his head down on the table once more. He had never been able to live that one down and when this one got out!

'Whatever happened this time should be really good,' Malcolm snickered to himself. Struggling to keep the smirk off of his face, he laid a hand on Trip's shoulder. This was obviously one of those times that rank could be laid aside. Besides if he insisted on being properly military right now there was no way he'd ever find out what happened! "I'm sure that he's right, Trip. It can't be that bad."

"Malcolm, T'Pol's and my subconscious decided to go and get hitched without asking us!" Trip growled. That did it for Malcolm's reserve. He joined Archer in fits of laughter. "It ain't funny guys! Vulcan's don't get divorced. Once you're hitched that it." That silenced the laughter abruptly. "Yeah, now you're getting the picture." he grumbled before taking another gulp of scotch.

"Isn't there any way the two of you can get out of it?" Malcolm asked seriously. This was an altogether different situation. Not that he believed for one minute that they should get divorced. The last few months had shown him that those two not only deserved each other, they were also madly in love even if they didn't know it.

"Nope, and any telepath who tries to break a 'chosen mate bond'," Trip made quote marks around the name, "is committing a death sentence felony under Vulcan law."

If there had been any laughter still hiding in the two men, that silenced it. "Why on earth would it be a death sentence felony?" Malcolm wanted to know. He hadn't known that Vulcans even had crimes they considered serious enough to have a death sentence for. They were all what he called modified pacifists; they wouldn't harm others until they had been attacked. Of course they weren't stupid enough to think that they wouldn't be attacked either, given their planet's history. That was why they maintained a military. They just watched and waited for their opponent to make the first move before they crushed them.

"The telepathic bond between mates is considered sacred. Anyone who tries to break it not only harms the bondmates involved, possibly even killing them, they are also going against hundreds of thousands of years of religion and custom. The bond goes so far back into Vulcan pre-history that no one knows when it got started." Trip sighed, "Basically when a marriage bond is completed the mates become almost a single entity, mentally speaking; or at least as close to it as is possible in this universe."

"Captain Kirk told me that if one half of a bonded pair dies, then most of the time the other dies as well from the shock," Archer murmured.

"I don't doubt it," Trip said. "It must be like having half of your soul ripped away." He sighed and rubbed his face. It wasn't like he hated T'Pol after all, he just wasn't sure he liked her some times. Ok, a lot of the time but it had to get better right? His and her minds had gotten along well enough to get them into this mess. "Dr. McCoy is waiting for me down in Sickbay. He's going to see if he can engineer us some kids in case we decide later we want them." He screwed the cap back onto the bottle and shoved it over to Archer. It wouldn't do to go over there drunk and he still had more repairs to do.

"What do you mean by that, in case you want them later?" Malcolm wanted to know.

"He's going to give us embryos in stasis boxes. That way T'Pol can carry the kids to term when we're ready. It also means that while he'll make sure that the embryos are viable, they'll still be young enough that they can be terminated if we don't want children. They'll only be a few hours old when they go into stasis. They'll still be at just the mass of cells stage, so we won't have a problem with termination." At that stage both of their cultures did not consider them children yet as they were incapable of independent movement. Trip knew though that they would be having the kids in spite of that fact. Somewhere at the base of his gut, the idea of his wife having someone else's kids when she could be having his didn't set well. This was the only time the technology would be available to them, so they had to do it now. He'd better get over there and let the docs get to work.

He also hadn't been joking about his parents. While his father's views about Vulcans were softening, (mostly due to his letters about his own growing respect for T'Pol) it was the thought of telling his mother that he'd gone and gotten married without telling her that really had his stomach in a mess. Well, that and the scotch. There was also the fact that this was all happening too fast. He just wished that he and T'Pol had more time to work on their relationship before getting hit with this.