T'Pol stared down at the unconscious man sprawled on the floor of her cabin, and sighed deeply.
It was not a recommended medical treatment to use a neck pinch to render a patient unconscious, but the lieutenant had been suffering such mental trauma that she had felt she had no choice.
She had released her control of his mind, but to her horror he had not emerged from the hallucination. It had been approaching the point where she felt that he might well suffer irreversible damage if it continued. At least the brief period of enforced oblivion would allow his neurotransmitters to begin normalizing, and alleviate the tremendous stress that was being inflicted on his whole nervous system.
At this point it was undoubtedly her duty to inform Phlox; if truth were told, she should have done so long ago. However, Lieutenant Reed had been absolutely emphatic that the doctor was not to be involved. His consent was conditional on this being private between the two of them, and to bypass that consent – even in his best interest – was a step she hesitated to take. He had been in absolute earnest when he had said that if Phlox was involved he would not proceed; there was really no way to interpret that as allowing any leeway whatsoever. She was quite sure that if it was a choice between remaining as he was now and having his explicit instructions flouted he would infinitely prefer the former.
Medically speaking, however, it was quite possibly his best, if not only, chance of recovery. That the ship's CMO would be extremely disturbed and angry that such an invasive procedure had been carried out without either his knowledge or supervision was inevitable, but he would certainly have drugs that would alleviate the patient's distress and allow his brain to recuperate. Whether he would accept that she had been right to attempt this was another matter, but Vulcan mental procedures were a strictly kept secret. He would not have been able to perform this himself, and it was something that the lieutenant had requested her to do, accepting the very real risks that he was running by doing so.
It was unlikely in the extreme that simply allowing him to wake naturally would result in him returning to normal; to all appearances he was trapped in his appalling delusion. The likelihood was that he would return to his previous state, and once more become unstable and dangerous. Human psychiatrists would attach the label 'insane' to him, and by their measures they would be correct. She had deliberately forced him to regress to this state; once in it, he would have no means of understanding that he was living in an induced reality.
Ideally, he should now be sedated and taken to Vulcan, for treatment in the monastery there. Maybe the healers could perform some ritual such as the Fullara, to help him deal with the trauma. Before the monastery at P'Jem had been violated, that had been the center for such healing, but since Enterprise had been involved in uncovering the scandalous misuse of a holy place as a cover base for spying on the Andorians, activity there had been relocated to Vulcan and the monastery at Mount Seleya. It was questionable whether the High Command would be happy about a human and a Starfleet officer being brought there; it was possible that they would even refuse to treat him; and it was unthinkable that either Starfleet, Captain Archer or the lieutenant himself would consent to his condition being made public knowledge – and quite possibly the subject of public ridicule. It was all too easy to imagine a number of Vulcans of her acquaintance imperfectly concealing smiles of derision at the Human whose inferior brain was in such a risible condition. Moreover, it was unlikely that the people who had inflicted this on him in the first place would allow their actions to become known, with all the scandal that would inevitably follow. She was under no illusions as to their willingness, and indeed determination, to do whatever might be necessary to preserve this terrible secret.
Life as an agent in the V'Shar had left T'Pol with few illusions. Nevertheless, even she was shocked to the core by the utter callousness of what had been done to Malcolm Reed. She did not know by what process it had been carried out, but somehow he had been traumatized into believing he was an animal – an animal whose survival depended on obedience. This belief had welded itself into his subconscious. Obedience, now, was for him not so much a choice as a compulsion. He might not even remember all of the details of what had happened to him; the brain is sometimes adept at forgetting what it cannot bear to remember. But it had left him maimed as surely as if the people who had done this to him had damaged his hearing or his eyesight for their own dark purposes.
Certainly it was not an irresistible compulsion. He had, after all, declined to speak to Agent Harris shortly after the incident in which his divided loyalties had been exposed – the captain had ordered that all incoming transmissions from that source should be monitored and recorded, and had been reassured by Reed's prompt refusal to enter into any conversation with his former handler. Nevertheless, for it to have driven him to act even once in a way so profoundly contrary to everything his crewmates had ever seen in him was the gravest evidence that it was an extremely dangerous flaw that might yet be exploited. The fact that he had chosen to expose himself to the terrible risk of this procedure now was further proof (if proof were needed) that he himself saw it in that light. And now, understanding what he had been – what he had been forced to become – she understood all too well the fear that gripped him at the thought that his old handler could still exert influence over him. For who knew how deeply that influence could go, and what else he might be called on to do?
She sat down on the floor opposite him. She had placed him in the recovery position and covered him with a blanket, and at first glance it appeared that he was merely sleeping. The surprisingly long dark fans of his eyelashes lay motionless. The shock produced by a neck pinch was equivalent to temporary sedation, and so for the first period of unconsciousness he would not dream. Later, as it moved into normal sleep, his brain would resume its cycle of activity preceding reawakening. It was hard to imagine, looking down at him, that he would not wake as the highly intelligent and self-disciplined officer she had known and trusted for so long. Tragically, however, it was all too likely that he would wake behaving as the sehlat-creature he believed himself to be, and events take on an inevitable momentum.
He had, indeed, been a damaged and a deeply dangerous man in the past, but somehow he had clawed his way out of the abyss and reshaped himself. He had earned his place aboard Enterprise and served there faithfully. Over all the years she had never seen any evidence of him as other than a loyal and devoted servant to the ship, and the agony it had cost him to allow her to force access to his memories was proof that he regarded that period of his past with shame and horror. It would be a rank injustice for him to lose not only his post and his career but even his reason in such a way.
There had to be some way to reach him. Some way to counteract, to countermand the conditioning he had received.
She stood up quickly, pulled on her clothes, and moved to the comm station on her wall. "T'Pol to Captain Archer," she said, toggling the call button.
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