5. The Promotion

"Hoshi. Where's Trip?" Archer asked; he couldn't raise the engineer on the comm, which was odd. He was beginning to think Trip must have left the ship for some reason.

"Hold on, Captain…he's…well, he's somewhere around the starboard impulse engine," Hoshi said. "I think he may actually be in the impulse engine."

"Would that explain why I can't raise him on comms?" Archer asked.

"Yes, Captain. We don't have comms equipment inside the engines," Hoshi said.

"I'll just track him down in person," Archer said, and headed for the starboard-side stern — where he did indeed find the area around the impulse engine in considerable disarray.

Archer frowned at the pieces of his impulse engine scattered around the corridor. For Trip, retreating into his engines was as much an indicator of stress as T'Pol's retreat into meditation. The disassembled engine looked, to Archer, like a whole lot of stress taking itself out on his ship. Grief, still? Or did it have something to do with Trip's most recent rebuff of Admiral Gardner? Maybe both? Maybe something else?

If it had to do with Trip's recent conversation with the Admiral, Archer would soon know.

Trip came crawling backward out of the guts of the engine, and stood scrubbing his hands with a towel that looked unlikely to be of any use for cleaning up. In fact, from the look of him, a half-hour soak in a tub full of degreaser might achieve little more than a good start. His hands, his face, and his hair were blackened with streaks of grease. He had tied the arms of his jumpsuit around his waist, but his black undershirt had not escaped unscathed: it was soiled with lighter gray soot-streaks, torn across one bicep and missing at least one button.

"Big job?" Archer asked.

Trip shrugged. "Had to pull the guts out of the driver coil and thrust nozzle assembly." He rubbed one blackened hand across the bridge of his nose, leaving a dark smear on top of what was already there. "Sorry to keep you waiting. Takes a while to get out of there."

"Shouldn't I know about a job like that before you start it?"

Trip shrugged. "It's not actually a 'big job,'" he said. "Doesn't have much impact on operational capacity while we're in spacedock."

"Trip. You're filthy."

"Well, it is just about the dirtiest job on the ship," Trip acknowledged.

"How long would it take you to clean up?" Archer asked.

"Maybe an hour," Trip said. To Archer's dismayed look, he said, "This stuff can be really hard to scrub off. And the scrub that takes it off always irritates my skin, so if it's all the same to you, I'd rather not clean up until the job's done." He examined his hands critically. "Gonna take weeks to get it out from under my fingernails. Kinda funny, really. Right when I'm itching like crazy from the scrub, I risk making it worse all over again, 'cause it's still under my nails."

"Huh," Archer said.

"Is this gonna take very long?" Trip asked. "Because we're kinda short-handed in engineering right now, and I hate to leave my people hanging."

"Not too long," Archer said. "Let's go…somewhere…we can talk."

"'Course," Trip said brightly, as if he didn't look like he had just crawled out of a grease fire.

Archer didn't want to take Trip to his quarters or his ready room, not in his present condition, but there weren't a lot of other options for private conversations, and the Captain's mess was completely out of the question. In the end, Archer settled unhappily on his ready room, where he tried not to cringe as Trip dropped into one of the chairs. This stuff can be really hard to scrub off. Well. It would fall to Trip's department to make sure it got done, at least. Trip's short-handed department. Of course.

"Trip, Admiral Gardner has asked me to talk to you about the Vostok."

Trip ran his tongue around the inside of his jaw and looked out the window at the spacedock frame that cradled Enterprise. "Not gonna let that go, is he?"

"Vostok needs a captain, and you're due a promotion. Why would you turn it down?"

"Vostok, sir? She's eight years old and barely makes warp 3. What am I gonna do on Vostok?"

Archer regarded the engineer, covered head to toe in grease. He supposed it was to be expected that an engineer who had crawled through the guts of the first warp 5 engine for four years might be less than thrilled about an older ship with an obsolete engine — but that didn't make the offer a poor one. He attempted to sound cheerful. "Well, maybe once you get hold of her, she'll do a lot better than warp 3."

Trip gave him a narrow-eyed look of disgust. "They aren't offering to make me chief engineer," he said, "and captains don't spend their time crawling over engines."

"So you're planning to be a chief engineer forever, then? This is the pinnacle of your Starfleet career?"

"It is until something better comes along," Trip said emphatically. "Vostok ain't exactly a step up from anything."

"Trip." Archer hated being put in this position. For one thing, Trip was right: after Enterprise, Vostok would feel like a huge step backwards, even if it was a promotion. For another, Trip had apparently made his mind up, and Trip with his mind made up was harder to shift than a dead-drunk Orion male. And, Trip was his friend. But Gardner was his superior, and he was right that Starfleet needed to be developing its officer corps — especially if this business with the Romulans turned into a shooting war. "I know it's not Enterprise," Archer acknowledged, "but frankly, I don't see that job coming open any time soon. Nor Columbia. And NX-03 hasn't made it off the drawing board yet, so you can't be holding out for that."

"I'm not holding out, sir. I'm happy where I am."

"For how much longer? Turning down your own command when it's offered has the potential to be a career-killing move. There's no guarantee you'll be offered another anytime soon."

"I'm not worried about it."

The man could be maddeningly laconic. Anyway, what had happened to the ambitious young man who drove himself mercilessly to become the youngest chief engineer in Starfleet, the first chief engineer on a warp 5 ship? Where was that Trip? "Are you going to be worried about it when Malcolm is promoted over you? Travis? Kelby?"

Trip laughed. "That'll be a long time coming."

He might actually be right about that. But Archer couldn't shake the feeling that there was no truly compelling reason for Trip to turn Gardner down. Which meant that whatever reason he had must not be truly compelling. "I think you should take the promotion."

"Is that an order?"

"No. I won't order you to do it. Frankly, I'm not anxious to lose you. But I think you should take it anyway."

Trip stared out the window, shaking his head. "What about T'Pol?"

"T'Pol? What about T'Pol?" What could T'Pol possibly have to do with this?

"She wasn't offered a command. Was she?" Trip's tone was accusatory.

"Not that I know of. Not in Starfleet."

"She's not going back to the Vulcans!" Trip said with conviction.

Archer wasn't sure what any of this had to do with the Vostok. "What about it?"

"She's senior to me. So why offer me the promotion?"

"You've served longer in Starfleet," Archer said. "So as far as that goes, you're senior. Plus —"

"Plus she's Vulcan," Trip said, when Archer didn't finish the sentence.

"Yes. She's Vulcan." And in the wake of the Terra Prime attack, putting a Vulcan — specifically, putting that Vulcan — in command of a Starfleet ship might be a little more provocative than Starfleet could afford to be, right at the moment.

"She's Starfleet, just as much as you or me."

"Trip…you can't tell me this is about you taking some sort of principled stand on order of seniority. And anyway, that's not the only factor that goes into a decision like this. Which, by now, you should know."

Trip shrugged, looking for all the world as if the whole business was just beneath him.

Archer began to feel as if Trip was determined to die aboard Enterprise. "Okay. You tell me, then. Pick a ship. Any ship in the fleet, except Enterprise. I bet if there were one you wanted, Gardner would let you have it."

Trip gave up staring out the window, looking down instead at his hands. He looked up again at Archer, no longer insouciant, no longer laconic. His blue eyes were intense. "There is no ship in this fleet or any other that could tempt me away from Enterprise."

"Not even Columbia?" Archer said, still trying to provoke some sort of honest response from his chief engineer. From his friend.

The expression that flitted across Trip's grease-smudged face was so deeply pained that Archer immediately regretted the dig. But why should it cut so deeply?

"Not even Columbia," Trip said hoarsely.

Archer had no gambits left to try. Gardner was just going to have to find somebody else for the Vostok. And every other ship in the fleet, apparently.

"I, uh…I better get back to that impulse engine," Trip said. He stood abruptly and left.

Archer watched him go. It didn't make sense. Okay, maybe Vostok was no plum post, but it would almost certainly have been temporary. NX-03 was bound to make it off the drawing board soon, and if there were a war, to be ready for launch pretty quickly. Who better to command her than an officer with years of deep space experience plus command experience, who already knew his way around an NX-class ship? If what he wanted was a warp 5 ship, taking the Vostok was a step up, not a step down. And even if they managed to avoid a war… it just didn't make sense.

There had to be something else going on. But what could it possibly be, that his closest friend, the one who had gone with him through the Xindi war and countless other scrapes, his truest brother-in-arms, would feel that he couldn't confide in him?

Trip was unreasonably stubborn sometimes, but that wasn't a matter for confidences.

Trip was impulsive sometimes, but that would argue against him determinedly staying put on Enterprise.

Trip was an engineer at heart, but that shouldn't override his ambition to such a degree as this.

Trip had once struggled with understanding alien cultures on their own terms, and in their own contexts — just as Archer had, at first. But they had long since outgrown that tendency. Both of them. All of them. The whole crew was long past that. And anyway, it shouldn't apply to this.

What did that leave?

Archer rubbed his eyes wearily, and reviewed their history. He could only come up with one other thing, and like their ability to encounter and come to terms with alien cultures, it wasn't something that ought to be in play in this situation. The only other thing he could come up with that might be affecting Trip's decision-making to this degree was … a woman. Women had been one of Trip's greatest weaknesses for as long as Archer had known him.

Especially — once they were in deep space — alien women.

Except for that business with the Orion women, which had just been really strange. He never had puzzled that one out completely. True, he'd been a little off his game for a couple of weeks after that incident, but he'd never revisited it once he was fully recovered. They'd had too much else going on, and by then it hadn't seemed very important. How had that gone exactly? His memory of that time was still just the slightest bit vague and fuzzy. The Orion women's pheromones had made all the men loopy and suggestible and violent, except Phlox who became dangerously sleepy, and all the women sick and headachy, except T'Pol who seemed to be completely immune because she was Vulcan, and…

Archer swore.

And then he swore some more.

And when he ran out of all the choice words he'd ever learned on Earth, he started on Vulcan…

…and Andorian…

…and Klingon…

He'd learned so much in deep space.

Except, it seemed, how to look right at the two people he trusted most and see what was really going on.