Chapter Nine
Betrayals
In the center Command chair, Jonathan Archer noted the number of crew members moving in and out of the Captain's sanctum. He sat for the time in the center seat as First Officer, but what he really wanted was to sit here by right, and doing so meant outliving the current occupant of that inner office. To do so meant that he had to know everything his 'superior' did.
So far as possible, his spy network allowed him to keep informed, but it was both a careful balance and a risky one. He kept those loyal to him on his leash with credits and promises of Promotion and better lives should the day come when he finally stood in command of this vessel; but though they worked for him, he did not trust any of them.
There certainly was no reason to trust them. Having sworn Oaths of Loyalty to the Captain of this ship, they were working for the First Officer instead, toward the day when he would be the Captain. He'd drawn them from their Oaths, binding them to him in his cause. They were, therefore, forsworn and not to be trusted. He doubted many would live past the day of his ascension. He would, in fact, have to have them all executed as traitors before the fact.
In the meantime, they had their uses. They kept him abreast of what his fellow officers were doing even as he made his own plans. And recently one of those plans involved compiling some vague but interesting rumors he'd started to hear about unusual events in the far removed Tholian Empire.
But for now, this recent activity in the Ready Room was something he had to know about – and preferably before he received a filtered version of it from his 'chief'.
x
He stood up, walking slowly about the bridge, examining every station in turn, his tour of inspection gradually taking him back to his destination, the tactical station in the rear of the bridge and the young woman who stood that post. Ensign Ann Anderson looked up as he arrived. He did not note that her eyes brightened at his closeness.
"Commander?"
Archer's lips barely moved; he doubted even T'Pol's Vulcan ears could pick up his words. "Tucker." Without missing a beat, he spoke in a normal tone. "Sensor status?"
"Nominal, sir." Anderson reported crisply. She favored him with a tiny smile, her hand moving up slightly along the console until her fingertips touched the back of his hand. "Both External and Internal sensors operating at 100 percent efficiency." Archer's double blink as she said 'internal' made her instructions clear. She was vastly relieved she only had to trace the Engineer on sensors, to keep him under surveillance, routing the records to Archer's personal console in his quarters. She so hated it when she was assigned to contact with anyone on a personal level, but Tucker was someone she prayed would never be given the chance to touch her. She, like all Terran women, knew about him very well. Her fellow crew women never failed, in the interests of their own safety, to keep one another informed about the idiosyncrasies of their shipmates, and Tucker was an extreme case even among those who had to be approached with care. He only wanted one thing and he didn't seem to know or care how to not make it hurt. In fact, pain and brutality were part of his nature in the bedroom, which explained why he was alone wherever a choice could be made.
Besides, there was only one man on this ship she had any desire to share anything intimate with.
Even though he stepped away, his hand leaving the reach of her fingertips, it was only pretending; she was sure. He knew how she felt, she was sure, though he pretended there was nothing there, cautious against the others on the bridge. She'd made her feelings, her interest, clear to him often enough, and she was certain she was right; he certainly felt as she did. Of that she had no doubt.
x
Archer continued his tour in the same manner he'd begun, scrutinizing everything, his manner and visage hard. He never seemed to lose that hard veneer; it seemed chiseled into his features, that perpetual frown, that iron set of face. In centuries past it had been called the 'look of eagles'; to his fellows it was more generally considered a look of vultures.
However, he reflected privately on his previous thoughts, amending them slightly. He would hate to have to kill the lovely young woman when his time came to take that center chair. Rather, a mole with her skills at the tactical sensors could retain her usefulness long after the others had outlived theirs. And she did have her uses, both on the Bridge and in the bed. In fact, it was there that she was particularly useful indeed.
Perhaps with her he would fulfill his promise; make her a Lieutenant. Perhaps he'd even give her Reed's job. The man was a competent soldier, but utterly useless when it came to independent thinking - and not dependable when it came to following orders.
Then again, there was only so much that could be said – safely – for 'independent thinking'.
The matter bore further consideration. After all, in the end it all came down to one very important question: Who can you trust when there is no one to be trusted?
There was only one answer to this. The only one that he could truly trust was himself.
xxx
Charles Tucker strode into Engineering like a thunderstorm. His manner was held tightly in check, but he so radiated fury that everyone around him sensed it as they would their own impending deaths.
Part of his fury came from the confrontation with Forrest, and part that it had taken place in front of a Sergeant. But then, much as people trained themselves to ignore the ubiquitous MACOs, when was the Captain ever without his guards?
However angry he was, Tucker swore he would bide his time. The day would come when Forrest would be without his precious MACOs, and Tucker would be there.
x
But for now he had others to deal with, and a chance to work off some of this raging fury.
Each man and woman of the combined Gamma and Alpha shifts gave his or her duty their absolute attention, paying strict care to the minutest detail. Those who were out of direct attention prayed they could remain so, and those in plain sight tried to keep Tucker from seeing that they held their breaths.
Tucker scanned the chamber, his personal domain and death sentence. The delta radiation emitted through the inadequate engine shielding of this and previous generation engines had destroyed his face and made certain everyone in this room would be toasting their own health years after he was gone. It was not that the shielding was faulty; no amount of shielding that could fit in a room this size and still allow humans inside could deal with the radiation these engines, and especially their predecessors, put out.
And he had worked longer, and more closely, with them than anyone else on the ship, so he was the one who was going to be first to pay the price. He had been in on the project since the innovative first years of the 'Archer Albatross'; so named by Starfleet engineers in dubious honor of the Enterprise's own First Officer's father.
But now he had no time for such thoughts.
Right now he was furious, even more so than usual, driven so by the thrice damned Captain. He swore that, if he lived long enough, he would even the score - or preferably, better it.
But for now there was an Engine to get to 100 percent, and as he looked around he decided there was also a way to work off his fury at the same time.
x
"Biggs!" he called sharply, and that man wished he'd found a more obscure place to stand as his name reverberated through the chamber from the voice of the god of Death.
"Sir!"
"The EPS manifolds; double check the alignment. I'm reading only 96.8 percent on this board."
"Yes, Sir!" George Biggs hurried to get to the specified units, grateful the duty would take him out of the main area for at least twenty minutes.
Tucker looked around the room. "Harris."
Thomas Harris knew his long streak of bad luck was continuing in full force. "Sir!"
"Check the couplings in the injectors. Make sure there's no particle drift in the matter regulators."
"Yes, Sir!" The man grabbed the necessary toolkit and tried to erect his own warp field as he exited.
"Jurcisin!" Acton Jurcisin wondered just which of his latest sins was about to be punished.
"Sir!"
"Check the Dilithium matrix."
"Sir!" He hurried to the crystals set in the huge engine.
"Sherman."
Mary Sherman turned quickly. "Sir!" She had to brush her red hair out of her eyes, dislodged as it was with the speed of her turning.
"Check the conduit on J2."
"Yes, Sir!" She turned back to her board, pulling up the diagnostic on the spot in question. A moment later she sensed a presence next to her and looked up into the hard face of Charles Tucker. 'Oh, hell.' she thought an instant before he spoke.
"Did I tell you to check the board, Ensign?"
She gulped, and snapped to attention and focused, eyes front, on a point just past his right shoulder, so she wouldn't have to look at that horribly scarred face. "No, Sir!" She had been on duty from Gamma, fourteen hours now, her thoughts were slowed and she had slipped. Badly.
"If I wanted to check the board, I would have checked the board."
"Yes, Sir!" She wished he would just shoot her and put her out of her misery.
"I told you to check the conduit on J2, didn't I?"
"Yes, Sir!" She felt the shroud of doom cover her.
"So get your kit, and get your ass up there."
"Yes, Sir!" She almost ran for the supply cabinet, unable to believe her good fortune; she'd been certain he was going to make an example of her before the entire crew. Yanking the toolkit out of its compartment, she hurried to the aft section and the ladder that led two stories up to the sealed upper level above the ceiling. There was a trapdoor in that ceiling that led to the flow regulators. She had one foot on the ladder when Tucker's sharp voice cut through the chamber.
"No, better yet, I'll do it." When she looked over her shoulder she saw him stalking toward her. "You'll assist. Left on your own, you'll probably blow up the ship."
'Oh farging hell.' Mary thought as she stepped aside, letting him precede her up the ladder. She'd gone from being one of many to having his undivided attention just when she'd hoped he would move on to another target.
She glanced around. The other engineers were relieved their Chief was leaving, but she knew better than to look for any sympathy on their faces. Each of them was clearly thinking the same thing: 'Better her than me.'
x
Tucker pushed the button at the access port high above the upper level catwalk, the portal in the ceiling sliding aside and he climbed up into the chamber. Mary Sherman followed as best she could, the large, heavy toolkit making it very hard to grip the railing of the ladder as she climbed the two stories into the upper chamber.
When they were inside, Tucker pressed the button on a wall panel that sealed the trapdoor in the 'floor'. Sherman turned to the junction in question. "Wait."
'Here it comes.' Sherman thought, bracing herself for a particularly scathing reprimand, one likely even more devastating for being delivered in solitude.
She turned, but when she saw Tucker's eyes her blood suddenly ran cold. "No!" she gasped, her voice just barely a whisper as he grabbed the small top of her uniform in both fists. He yanked her to him so hard she was pulled off her feet, the zipper on the brief top tearing open, the material halving, exposing her completely. The loud crash of the heavy kit spilling a score of tools onto the metal deck rang through Engineering and masked her scream.
xxx
Volare, the tall Trill slave, crawled as quietly as he could through the access tube on C Deck. He had to be very quiet, as he was passing Astrometrics and this was normally a fairly quiet section of the ship. Maintenance crews did perform regular checks and work here, but on the whole it was better to be quiet than to pretend to be a team of technicians. Volare knew the officer whose station was just behind this bulkhead, Seamus O'Cathain, had very discerning ears and would be able to tell the difference.
So he worked cautiously, bent low almost on his knees in the tight space, drawing ever closer to the electrical junction that was his target. In his pocket was a disk shaped canister, 6 inches across and two high. It was small enough to be secreted and was very powerful indeed. In fact, even without the explosive, the melankite within, exposed to oxygen, would eat through his flesh in an instant, leaving in seconds nothing of him but a temporary smear of goo on the rapidly dissolving metal.
Moving carefully, he approached the junction of two tubes, in the ceiling of which ran the electrical leads that supplied power to this portion of the massive starship. Getting under them, he reached into his pocket and carefully withdrew the melankite bomb. The timer was already pre-programmed, synchronized to all the others and to the main chronometer on the Andorian ship that, in less than two days, would attack to blow Enterprise from the cosmos.
Reaching up, he carefully tucked the disk between one of the leads and the wall, wedging it into place. There were three leads in this spot, and when the bomb went off it would take all of them out and spread a coating of the fast acting corrosive over everything. Even if the Terrans had the time to try to make repairs, it would be impossible to enter the area to work until the corrosive had done its job, and worn itself out in dissolving the area. Volare had no idea how long that would take.
The Trill moved back a few feet and examined the area. He could see no evidence of the bomb's presence. Satisfied things were as secure as he could possibly make them; he withdrew from the area as carefully as he'd arrived.
He'd be back at his duties in less than five minutes, far too soon for his absence to have been noticed, since his duties often required him to be in several places at once. His part was done. The rest was up to the others.