The darkness has sounds in it.
A low hum, interspersed with a regular bleeping.
A steady hushing sound, that comes and goes to the slow rise and fall of his chest.
Voices, beyond the verge of his comprehension.
'...received the information just in time...'
'... sent to intercept him...'
'... working alone ... some kind of grudge...'
'... enormously grateful...'
'... misinformed...'
'... indebted...'
'... face justice...'
His left hand twitches. There's something taped into the back of his right that shouldn't be there. He has to pull it out.
He can't move his arms.
His chest goes on rising and falling, rising and falling.
In the chasm of his mind he moans.
The sound falls away into the darkness, and he falls with it.
There is still sound.
The bleeping goes on, regular and passionless.
The hushing noise is the ventilator, keeping him alive. His chest still rises and falls, even when he tells it not to.
Hands are moving him gently, changing his position so that he won't develop pressure sores. Changing the –
Agony howls through his chest. The bleeping becomes frenzied.
He howls with it. No, no, NO!
Murmuring voices. '...This is what their database recommends...'
No...
Bleeping. Quiet and regular.
The hushing is gone.
He tries to stop breathing, and an alarm sounds. There is the tiny metallic sound of a valve opening in response, and fluid courses down the tube into his arm. Unwanted, artificial calm floods his mind. His pulse steadies. He draws a long, uneven breath, but after a moment his breathing is regular again.
He stares up at the ceiling. It is dim. He is quite alone.
No. No. No.
The bleeping is still regular.
He tries to move his arm. He wants to pull the tube out of it.
He can't.
It would be easier if they despised or even mistreated him. They don't. They simply care for him, wary and uncomprehending. Suddenly he truly is an alien, in a way he hadn't been before.
He can tell, though they never speak to him. At a guess, they don't want to hear anything he has to say. They probably can't imagine how to deal with any communication he might make, even if he had the desire or the ability to do so.
Their care is unrelenting. They make sure he's never unsupervised, never out of their control. He lies in a sterile nightmare, alone.
Helpless.
The darkness draws back again.
Light has come into the room – natural light, so that his eyes blink at it feebly.
Colour has come in with it. He's become attuned to the white coats of the people who attend to the machines, and the strong blueness so close to him is stunning.
"Yes." The familiar voice is cool, dispassionate. "I can make a formal identification. This man was one of my crew."
His fingers scratch weakly on the sheet. He watches the drift of condensation on the inside of his oxygen mask.
... 'indebted' ... 'Starfleet' ... 'gratitude' ... 'friendship' ... 'treaty' ... 'prisoner' ... 'trial' ... 'evidence' ...
The blueness vanishes.
The beeping continues.
He wonders if he's imagined everything.
Movement.
The bed is moving.
He clutches at the mattress beneath him, momentarily afraid. There is white, and blue.
The air changes. It pushes at his face, fresh and astonishing. Overhead, more blue: infinitely lighter and far away, with birdsong in it.
No, he says soundlessly.
Grey, with black lettering on the side. They manoeuvre his mattress gently through the opening, placing it carefully on the floor.
Familiar faces look down at him. He returns their gaze, silent and desperate.
No.
Sickbay.
Phlox, pottering around talking to his menagerie. Coming to the bedside every so often to check on the readings; not saying much, but his smile is gentle and fatherly. His care is as constant as it had always been on every occasion when a battered Tactical Officer of his acquaintance was once again in need of restoration. You wouldn't know from his hands that he's caring for a murderer and an assassin.
Trip, coming in after his shift is over. Talking about the everyday doings in Engineering and the Armoury. Bernhard and Em have done a fine job: 'You'd be proud of 'em, Malcolm.' Every now and then, reading a chapter from Ulysses, and almost managing to sound as though he's actually enjoying it.
Travis, filling him in on the gossip he's missed. The gregarious helmsmen seems not to notice the silence, and gives him the lowdown on news from HQ as well, seemingly determined to bring him up to speed with everything that has been happening in the outside world since his ... illness.
Bernhard, as usual stuck for conversation. Going over the latest test results, and pleased with the way the port cannon seems to have stopped playing up.
T'Pol, giving him a formal report on where the ship has been and what has happened during his absence. Her voice is reassuringly normal. He doesn't have to waste energy searching it for sub-tones. She's submitted daily reports to his work station as normal, and is sure he'll catch up with them when he's feeling stronger.
Em, glaring at him. Loosing off a tirade of Spanish invective on the apparently fruitful topic of male stupidity, and then plumping down on the chair beside him and taking his hand. "Conseguir bien, Patrón..."
He hasn't seen the captain. Hasn't expected to, really. What is there to be said?
There was one other, though.
He hadn't expected her, exactly. Every time the sound of the doors brings his eyes open in hopeless hope, he lashes himself for his stupidity. Even his brain is playing tricks on him, for in the mornings when he rouses to the waking noises of the menagerie and Phlox's relentless cheerfulness he sometimes thinks he catches a waft of vanilla and musk. It comes as a shock, having the oxygen mask removed; the smell of the bottled air has begun to be part of his normality.
The doctor is pleased with the progress of his chest wound. It's apparently healing nicely. Considering that a couple of centimetres down and to the right it would have been instantly fatal, it had done remarkably little damage. After delivering himself of that information, Phlox goes away to feed one of his creatures, grumbling to himself about primitive projectile weapons.
He looks at the ceiling. That had been the entire point. Stunning him would have left Starfleet open to the accusation that it had been a set-up. Even using the phase rifle set to 'kill' wouldn't have achieved the same end, in the unlikely event that he could have persuaded Leo to authorise it. The Sashwe were deeply visual, lived through their eyes. Loved colour and display. If anything was to sink into their collective consciousness, it had to be dramatic. And the Lee Enfield had been lovingly cared for. No weapons expert worth their salt could possibly have resisted practising with it.
The needs of the many...
The whole point of eliminating Bheval had been to eliminate opposition to the prospective treaty with Starfleet. But if his opposition could be eliminated instead – transformed to gratitude – the innocent Sashwe were so fatally easy to misguide...
Not exactly what the Section had had in mind. But it achieved the same object, and the body count afterwards would only be one. And that one a man whom far fewer would miss than Isahd Bheval.
He's not devout. He has no fixed beliefs in God, although there have been odd moments in his life when he's experienced something that might fall under the heading of an intimation of 'Something Other'. On a remote hillside once, seated in the middle of a ring of long-fallen stones raised six thousand years ago by others who'd also, perhaps, felt that same uncanny sense of being 'presenced' there, he'd thought that this was as close as he'd ever come to experiencing spirituality. Nevertheless, although even now he perceives his life to be almost without value he would still want only to give it up in a good cause. To simply surrender it for nothing is unworthy of a Reed.
The plan he'd come up with had necessitated him taking the greatest risk of his life, and literally with his life: putting it out on the palm of his hand, for Fate to take or spare. That wasn't quite the same, in his view, as willing himself to die, though a part of him had possibly prayed that Paw wasn't as good as he thought she was, and that even if she hit him precisely where she intended to, the Sashwe would turn on a dying would-be assassin and tear him to pieces. Instead of which they'd summoned medical help and brought him back to the land of the living, if only so that he could face the justice of his own people as a renegade. Who could doubt Starfleet's good intentions now that they'd shot one of their own in plain view? If ever a national turn-around was achieved in the time it took to squeeze a trigger, this had been the day. Bheval himself had said that he'd been sorely misguided as to the Earth organisation's untrustworthiness, and that 'certain elements' who'd given him seriously inaccurate information about Humans would be dealt with most severely. Every one of the planet's political parties had been united in their shocked decree that 'they' would be forbidden to visit Traan, ever again.
The day he'd overheard that, he'd laughed. The laughter had hurt his chest and made his eyes leak, and the people tending the machines had hurriedly sedated him again so that he stopped laughing, though the water still ran out of his eyes, and the doctors, troubled and perplexed, ran checks for infection that came up negative.
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