ENTERPRISE – THE MAIDEN VOYAGE

by Soledad

For disclaimer, rating, etc. see the Introduction.

Notes are at the end of the chapter.


Chapter 04 – The Invisible Foe

Having reached the half-way mark of their voyage without any serious problems, Jack decided to give the new engines a real push. Meaning to accelerate to maximum travelling velocity which, in the Enterprise's case, was warp four point five. When the new ship had proved that it can hold that speed for a considerable length of time, they would make an attempt to go to the speed limit. But this wasn't the time for that just yet.

Of course, they timed the test for the morning shift when Charlie Tucker would be on duty down in Engineering and Mayweather on the bridge. For this, they needed their best men (and women). Including T'Pol, Hoshi and, much to Jack's dismay, Lieutenant Reed.

The bridge was very quiet, tense with anticipation. The only sound that could be heard was the low hum of the engines as the ship picked up speed and the stars streaked along behind the large windows. They had been travelling at warp four point two for several hours by now.

"Seems okay to me," Jack declared; then he looked at Mayweather. "Why don't you try four-three?"

Mayweather grinned and slowly increased their speed. There was a slight change of pitch in the sound of the ship's engines.

"Warp four point three, sir," Mayweather reported proudly.

For a moment they all listened, waiting for something to happen. It didn't.

"Not much of a change," Reed finally summarized what everyone was thinking.

Everyone but Hoshi, that is.

"I don't know..." she began nervously, avoiding to even looking in Reed's direction. "Does anybody else feel that?"

"Feel what?" Jack asked, concerned.

He knew that Hoshi's ears were more sensitive to any changes than the best instruments. Which was whey he'd wanted her on his ship.

"Those... vibrations," she explained. "Like little tremors."

"You're imagining it," T'Pol said coolly.

"No, she isn't," Jack said. "She just has the best ear on this ship."

"It is possible that the hull plates would vibrate stronger with increasing speed," Mayweather offered. "I know this is a brand new ship, but things like that happened on the Horizon all the time."

Jack nodded, glad to have someone with Mayweather's experience on board. "Let's test that theory. Bring us to four-four, Ensign."

Mayweather did as he'd been told, with an almost manic glee in his eyes. A tiny shudder was now clearly felt by everyone, and the deep sounds of engines working as the ship accelerated were more audible than before.

Hoshi grabbed the sides of her seat, looking as if she'd become sick any moment. "There! What do you call that?"

T'Pol consulted the readings on her console.

"The warp reactor was recalibrating," she said calmly. "It shouldn't happen again," then she added in Vulcan, only for Hoshi to understand. "There is nothing to fear."

Hoshi shot her a grateful look but before she could have relaxed, a small alarm sounded at Reed's station.

"Now what?" she asked anxiously.

"The deflector's sequencing," Reed explained in a slightly condescending manner. "It's perfectly normal."

Hoshi clearly doubted that but didn't dare to argue with him. T'Pol glanced at her in well-concealed concern.

"Are you all right, Ensign?" she asked in Vulcan. "Would you like to go to your quarters and lie down?"

"Ponfo mirann!" Hoshi hissed, angrily, humiliated and near to tears

T'Pol's only answer was a raised eyebrow.

Not understanding what they had been talking about, Jack became concerned that they were heading to a cat-fight and tried to intervene.

"It's easy to get a little jumpy when you're travelling at thirty million kilometres a second," he said with one of his big, fake grins. "Should be an old hat in a week's time."

Another tone was heard and Hoshi tensed immediately… but it was only the intercom signal. Jack taped a button on the arm of his chair. "Archer."

"This is Doctor Phlox, Captain," the distinctly accented voice of the Denobulan answered. "Our patient is regaining consciousness."

"On my way," Jack stood. "Hoshi, with me! T'Pol, you've got the bridge!"

He saw Reed's jaw clenching as he headed for the turbolift, with Hoshi in tow.


When they reached Sickbay, the Viseeth was still lying on the biobed, her large eyes wide and wild with fear, and she was making hissing and clicking sounds, intermittent with low whistles. She seemed very agitated. A security guard armed with a plasma rifle stood watch, eyeing her warily.

"Ghlungit !tak nekleet!" she shouted.

"What's wrong?" Jack asked.

Hoshi worked on her PADD furiously, punching buttons and frowning.

"The translator's not locking onto her dialect," she explained unhappily." The syntax won't align."

"What if you tried Vulcan with her?" Jack suggested. "T'Pol says they all speak it. Tell her we're taking her home."

Hoshi nodded in understanding and said something that sounded in Jack's ear like "Etek tu tatau ha-ket" – or something similar. His Vulcan was practically nonexistent, save for a few phrases of formal greetings, so he completely depended on Hoshi in this.

"Ltrunghi !krgltt!" the Viseeth snarled.

"That didn't sound Vulcan," Jack commented.

Hoshi shook her head. "She wants to know who we are."

Jack shrugged. "Tell her. But stick to Vulcan. It's safer that way."

Hoshi nodded again. "Etek nem-tov Kominh. Tu nem-tov fi'yel-hali Enterprise," she told the Viseeth.

The eyes of the alien widened even more. "Wilat t'nash-veli yel-hali nevintor?" she demanded.

"She's asking for her ship back," Hoshi translated for Jack.

"Nice to know that she did have one to begin with," Jack muttered. "Say it was destroyed."

Hoshi dutifully translated the statement into Vulcan and braced herself for an angry outburst. But the alien only closed her luminous eyes for a moment; then said a single word. "Suliban."

Jack looked at Hoshi askance; she shrugged.

"I'm going to need to run what we've got through the phonetic processor," Jack sighed and Hoshi shrugged again in apology. "I'm sorry, Captain... I'm doing the best I can, but that particular word wasn't in the Vulcan database T'Pol gave us. And it's not Vulcan, either. In fact, it doesn't show up in any of the languages I know."

"Because it's not a word," Phlox intervened. "It's the name of a rather unremarkable species that I've met briefly, right before coming to Earth."

"What a coincidence," Jack commented grimly.

"You think these Suliban were chasing her to Earth?" Hoshi asked doubtfully.

Before Jack could have answered, though, the entire ship shuddered as it dropped out of warp. Hoshi instinctively grabbed Jack's arm.

"That's the warp reactor again, right?" she asked, although she had the gut feeling that it hadn't been.

Concerned, Jack tapped the nearest comm button. "Bridge, report."

"We've dropped out of warp, sir," T'Pol's calm voice answered. "Main power is…"

A brief burst of static interrupted her, then the comm went dead. The lights started to flicker and the medical consoles of Sickbay began to go out, one by one.


On the bridge, Lieutenant Reed stared at his console as it went out under his hands… literally

"I think I saw something off the starboard bow..." he muttered.

"Try to be more precise, Lieutenant," T'Pol said calmly. "What did you see?"

"I don't know," Reed admitted in frustration. "It may've just been the sensors going down..."

"That would be a rather unlikely coincidence," T'Pol stated wryly. "Remember, unknown forces with stealth technology have already tried to get hold of our… passenger."

Reed shot her a baleful look across the darkened bridge, still smarting over the fact that the captain let her in charge.

"Your suggestion, Subcommander?" he asked, with added emphasis on her rank.

T'Pol ignored his attitude. "Switch to auxiliary power and go to intruder alert," she ordered.

"Communications are dead, Subcommander," Hoshi's replacement, Crewman Baird reminded her.

"I am aware of that fact, Crewman," she replied evenly. "However, switching to auxiliary power will allow us to give one general warning before that source might be affected as well," she gave Reed a piercing look. "Do as I told you, Lieutenant, before it will be too late."

Realizing that she was right, Reed swallowed his wounded pride and carried out her orders.


With the warp core having shut down spontaneously, Engineering was submerged in complete darkness. The duty crew, including Lieutenant Hess, Ensign Sandra Massaro and Crewman Rostov's entire team, were using handheld beacons, trying to find the reason for the sudden power loss. Charlie Tucker had already tried to contact the captain several times, but the comm panel stubbornly remained dead.

"Dammit!" he swore under his breath. "Fletcher, lock off the coolant tanks! I don't want them blowin' into our faces, should the power suddenly return."

"Already done, Chief," Fletcher assured him.

At that moment, the consoles began to glow weakly, as auxiliary power came online, and Lieutenant Reed's posh voice echoed through the entire ship.

"Attention all hands, this may be your only warning. Intruder alert! This is not a drill! We have potentially hostile intruders on board. Security teams, report to your assigned posts and begin a complete sweep, starting with Sickbay. I repeat: this is not…"

Before he could have finished the sentence, auxiliary power was cut off, too, and everything went dark again.

"What the hell was that supposed to mean?" Anna Hess asked in her harsh German accent. Her people might have lived on the Valhalla colony for over a century, but that didn't make her Standard sound any better.

Charllie shrugged. "I don't know any more than you do, Anna, but since they're startin' the sweep in Sickbay, I guess this had somethin' to do with our passenger."

"Do you think they'd try to sabotage the engines – whoever they are?" Rostov asked in concern.

"Afraid they might," Charlie replied grimly. "So stay focused, people, and let's try restorin' power. I hate bein' helpless!"


Sickbay was pitch dark, too, save for the beacons Jack, Hoshi and Dr Phlox were using to check their surroundings. The Viseeth was hissing anxiously, still restrained to the biobed. Chirps and whistles came from the various alien life forms the doctor had brought with him in a low-tuned cacophony.

"Auxiliary power should've kicked in by now," Jack muttered.

As if on clue, power did return briefly; long enough for them to hear Lieutenant Reed's warning. Then everything went dead again.

"Well," Jack commented grimly. "That explains things."

The Viseeth became more and more agitated; the pitch of her hisses rose half and octave as she tugged on her restrains with surprising strength. Jack's ears began to hurt.

"Do you know how to tell her to shut up?" he asked Hoshi who, growing more nervous by the minute, flashed her beacon from wall to wall.

She growled something to the Viseeth in Vulcan, but it had no effect whatsoever. Phlox scanned her with a small, handheld device of Denobulan design that had its own power source.

"Her pre-frontal cortex is hyper-stimulated," he said with a frown. "I doubt she has any idea what she's saying."

"Sedate her if you have to," Jack ordered. "I need to get to the bridge," and with that he headed for the door… until Hoshi's low, urgent voice stopped him.

"Captain, there's someone here, she murmured, moving her beacon across one of the bulkheads.

"Hoshi..." Jack didn't exactly say it, but it was clear he thought she was being paranoid.

She didn't give up so easily, though. "I'm telling you, there is someone..."

She stopped as her beacon illuminated a humanoid shape. Like a chameleon, it had taken on the appearance of its background and was barely visible. Once discovered, the figure leapt back into the darkness.

They only realized that the Viseeth had suddenly fallen silent when she spoke again, in a low, well-articulated manner, "Suliban."

Jack swept their surroundings with his beacon and found a second figure, perched like a spider high on a wall; however, this one was not camouflaged.

"Fuller!" Jack hissed to the guard watching over their passenger.

Crewman Fuller raised his rifle in the same moment as the second intruder leapt to the ground, where a third one quickly darted into the shadows. Fuller fired at them. The bright red plasma bullets illuminated the room in a series of quick, stroboscopic flashes.

The scene caused memories of her arresting resurface in Hoshi's mind and she panicked. Crouching low to avoid the gunfire, she kept erratically scanning with her beacon.

"Behind you!" she shrieked, spotting motion behind the guard.

Fuller whirled around to take aim but was a nanosecond too slow; or rather, the intruder lunging at him was too fast. He hit the deck hard and his weapon went sliding across the floor.

Jack's body moved before his conscious mind would have found the time to catch up. He lunged and rolled towards the weapon in one fluid movement, grabbed it and fired while still in motion. The intruder got hit with a full salvo and flew backwards until the bulkhead stopped it.

Jack grinned. "I'll never say a word against Starfleet's survival camp again!"

But it wasn't over yet, as the Viseeth's agitated whistle reminded him. He scanned the surrounding area of the biobed – and spotted one of the intruders directly over the ceiling, like a spider in its lair. In the next moment the creature leapt; simultaneously, Jack was knocked off his feet; his beacon rolled away, uselessly.

For a moment, Sickbay went dark and silent. Only the agitated clicking and chirping of Phlox's little creatures could be heard… and, distantly in the background, a low-pitched whine they could not identify. But Hoshi was sure it didn't belong to the usual background noise of the ship. She'd already grown familiar with that.

"Captain?" she murmured worriedly, though she was quite sure Jack hadn't heard it.

But before she could have voiced her concern, warp power came back online with a great surge, and the lights and consoles began to come alive, one by one.

Light came back as well, and they all blinked until their eyes get used to the brightness again. Crewman Fuller, still dazed from the impact, slowly pushed himself into sitting position and groaned. Phlox rushed to his aid, scanning him.

"Mild concussion," he diagnosed. "I'll give you a hypospray against nausea; otherwise you'll be as good as new in a day or two."

Hoshi carefully straightened her back; it tingled from the crouching position she had maintained for some time. As she looked around, she saw one of the intruders, dead, sprawled just inches from her. Disgusted, she edged away a bit.

"Captain," she said, fighting down her nausea with sheer willpower. "We've got one of them."

"Yeah," Jack replied slowly. "Unfortunately, they've got one of us, too."

Following his glare, Hoshi saw that the biobed was empty.


Ten minutes alter they were back to the bridge, sitting at their station – with the exception of Jack, who was standing behind his chair, arms crossed, anger radiating from his whole bulk like a black cloud.

"We've got state-of-the-art sensors on this ship," he growled. "Why the hell didn't we detect them?"

"If these guys are the same people who'd chased the cow lady to Earth, they were probably usin' the same stealth technology," Tucker pointed out. "The same technology our Vulcan friends refused to tell us about."

"Mister Reed thought he detected something right before we lost power," Mayweather offered helpfully.

Jack gave Reed, who was working his console furiously, a cold glare. "Did he now? And I was to be told that – when exactly?"

"The starboard sensor logs recorded a spatial disturbance," Reed replied evenly. "You were in Sickbay, sir."

Charlie sauntered over to Tactical and peered over Reed's shoulder.

"Looks more like a glitch," he commented.

Hoshi gave him a wounded look. "Those weren't glitches in Sickbay."

"I didn't say you were wrong," Tucker said soothingly. "Besides, even glitches need to be reported," he said with emphasis," and analysed, for safety purposes."

"Which is why I want a complete analysis of that disturbance," Jack said.

"You'll get it, Captain," Tucker was already heading for the turbolift.

Jack turned to Reed. "Where do we stand on weapons?"

"I still have to tune the targeting scanners..." Reed began.

"What're you waiting for?" Jack interrupted. "Or we can just give the task to Crewman Fuller. He knows the ship's torpedo systems better than anyone else; he helped design them, after all."

"That won't be necessary, sir," Reed answered stiffly and looked at his second-in-command, Paul Foster. "Lieutenant, take over for me here."

"Aye, sir," Foster stepped up to the tactical console as Reed left.

"Captain," T'Pol spoke quietly. She had vacated the captain's chair upon Jack's return and went back to the science station.

Jack ignored her. "Dr Phlox seemed to know who these are," he said to Hoshi. "Go and get everything from him. And see if you can translate more from what the cow lady said."

"Right away, sir," Hoshi replied crisply and left.

"Captain," T'Pol tried again. Jack turned to her. "There's no way you could have anticipated this. I am certain Ambassador Soval can make the Viseeth understand."

For a moment Jack's face darkened with fury. Then he forced himself to hold back… for the moment anyway.

"You're the science officer," he said in a clipped tone. "Why don't you help Trip with that analysis?"

"The astrometric computer in San Francisco will be far more effective," she suggested.

Jack gave him a thin, unpleasant smile. "We're not going to San Francisco, so make do with what we've got here."

T'Pol looked at him in honest confusion. "What for? You've lost the Viseeth. Your mission is over."

"I didn't lose the cow lady," Jack corrected. "She was taken. And I'm going to find out who took her – and get her back."

"How do you plan to do that?" T'Pol asked in a slightly patronizing manner. "Space is very big, Captain... a shadow on your sensors won't help you find them. This is a foolish mission."

Jack withstood the urge to hit her… barely.

"Come with me," he spat, heading for his ready room. T'Pol dutifully followed.


Once the door closed behind them, Jack whirled around.

"I'm not interested in what you think about this mission," he snapped. "So take your Vulcan cynicism and bury it along with your repressed emotions."

Not the least intimidated, T'Pol raised an eyebrow. "A little more control over your emotions would do you good, too, Captain. But you have misunderstood me."

"You called our mission foolish," Jack growled. "What's there to misunderstand?"

"The reason why I was saying it," she replied. "Captain, the information Gerasen Gerasal is carrying might be crucial for the outcome of the Viseeth's struggle with their unknown enemy; an enemy that would use every method to get it. We do not know who is behind this… this campaign to sow conflict in our galactic quadrant, but one thing is certain: they are much more powerful than you are. They have technology this ship, state-of-the-art it might be according to Earth standard, cannot match. You simply do not have the means to find Gerasen Gerasal; let alone rescue them."

Jack smiled grimly. "Despite having spent years on Earth and having worked for your Ministry of Intelligence, you don't know much about humans, do you? One of our best traits is to grow with the challenges we're facing."

"Perhaps," she allowed. "But this is not the right moment to prove that particular theory. Too much is at stake."

Jack smiled mirthlessly. "I've been listening to you Vulcans tell us what not to do all my life. I watched my father work his ass off while your scientists held back just enough information to keep him from succeeding. He deserved to see that launch. You may have life spans of two hundred years; we don't."

T'Pol knew about the fate of Henry Archer, of course. T'Kahr Soval had mentioned with regret how that brilliant mind (for a human anyway) had been destroyed, little by little, by the disease; it was a terrible waste indeed. And it was understandable, on a purely theoretic level at least, that Jack Archer felt a bit vengeful towards her people on his late father's behalf.

It was illogical, of course. Her people had not given Henry Archer the disease; nor had they known the means to stop it. But that did not change the fact that – had the Vulcans been a little more forthcoming – he would have been able to finish his work and see his engine fly with his mind still more or less intact.

She did not feel guilty. Guilt was an emotion, and a particularly useless one at that. Besides, she had no part in the whole affair. Still, perhaps to atone for the mistake of her people, she would do her best to help Henry Archer's son on this impossible mission.

"You are not going to be contacting Starfleet to advise them of our situation," she said.

It was not really a question, but Jack answered it anyway.

"No. I'm not. And neither are you," T'Pol raised a sceptical eyebrow but Jack ignored the gesture. "Now get the hell out there and make yourself useful."

After a momentary lack of any motion to show her disapproval, T'Pol turned on her heels and did exactly that. Jack turned to the window and looked out at the stars streaking by at low warp.

The cow lady – no, he corrected himself, she had a name, even if it was a ridiculous one; perhaps they could shorten it to G.G. – was somewhere out there, in the hands of her enemies. Because he, Jack Archer, insisted on taking her home personally. If she was to be tortured, maimed or killed for the information she was carrying, it would be his fault.

Perhaps they would have taken her from a Vulcan ship, too. But it was more likely that she'd have been safer on a Vulcan behemoth than on the barely finished, experimental Earth vessel. Yet he had insisted, and he had been within his rights, so she was now in grave danger.

He hoped they could find her in time. Not just because of her importance but because she was now his responsibility.

The chirping of the comm unit interrupted his brooding. It was Hoshi.

"Captain, you should come to Sickbay," she said. "Dr Phlox would like to show you something."

"On my way," he replied, heading for the door.

For some reason he doubted he'd like what Phlox wanted to show him.

~TBC~


I used the unidentified alien language Hoshi was teaching in the pilot to simulate the Viseeth speech. The Vulcan expressions were cobbled together using the online Vulcan dictionary - they may not be grammatically correct, but this is the best I could come up with.