"Holy shit!" Jamie laughed at the look of shock on Bones' face as she moved to hug the engineer and Trip kissed her.
"You look good old man."
Trip chuckled, "I'm not that old, I'm 136 and I don't look a day over fifty, thank you very much."
"You cheated though, you got help from some alien medical tech. You know you're gonna have to share that with me one day. I wanna look this good when I get older," she told him. He chuckled, nodded and looked at her friends.
"How hard was it not to tell them?"
Jamie shook her head, "We dropped hints, I think some of the others on the ship figured it out. Bones is gonna let me hear it later." Trip looked over her shoulder at Bones.
"I guess my dreams of fathering your children are out." Jamie laughed and rolled her eyes, only Trip would actually say that to her.
To the rest of the universe, Trip Tucker died a hundred years ago, the –very classified- reality was that he faked his death and went undercover to stop the Romulans from developing an advanced warp system. He was one the first humans to see Romulans first hand; and he reported back how similar they were to Vulcans. Starfleet kept that info under wraps for a while so that it didn't kill the coalition. Bones looked between them.
"How do you know a man who's supposed to be dead long before we were all born?" Bones asked. Jamie sighed but Trip spoke before she could.
"We met when she was five. I was visiting the Starfleet Memorial and saw this little girl sitting in front of the wall. She told me her dad was listed on it and she wondered if he really hated her like all the other kids said," Trip told the officers. Kids are mean, no matter where you are or what you do, they're just mean. Jamie never understood why people singled her out, at least back then she didn't. It was one thing to know your father and to have him shape your life and career but it's another to never even meet the man and be compared to him every single day. Jamie went to normal school for three months, between her sky-high aptitude and all the harassment, her grandfather pulled her out and let her go to school from home.
"You made some lame joke about Romulans and then you realized who I was. I still think it was hilarious," Jamie said.
Trip smirked, "I didn't tell her who I was then, but I think she figured it out because six years later, we saw each other again."
Jamie chuckled, "I was with Hoshi and he went to see her."
Trip glanced at her, "They know?" She nodded.
"Okay, I want the story behind that, J.T. Anyway, I hopped off the shuttle, walked to my friend's house and she's in the garden with this little slip of a girl, tending her azaleas and cursing in Klingon. Jamie would repeat after her and then they'd switch languages, it was impressive. She looked up at me and repeated my joke from the memorial, I knew who she was almost instantly." The group looked at her and then at Trip. "I was there for a while, she would follow me around and help me build or fix stuff. I'm the person to blame for her love of engineering. Her first degree was in math." Jamie smiled at the memories; she had a huge crush on him back then, even though he's more than a hundred years older than her. He's an attractive guy with an amazing brain and a good heart, she wasn't gonna apologize for liking him. "J.T., if I had only stayed another few weeks…"
"The crops would've still failed and Kodos would've dragged you out of Hoshi's house and shot you in the head like he did to her. I barely made it out alive and I only left because she made me promise to survive," she told him. The first time she talked to Tucker after Tarsus, he blamed himself for not being there to help her or Hoshi but Jamie shut him down every time, it wasn't his fault that he had a job to do. Jamie sighed, "Now that we've taken that wonderful trip down memory lane… Are we working for 31 or just with 31?"
Trip smiled, "With, I would cut off my arm before I let you join Section 31. You're here to help me stop a war from starting. I'm sure you've been briefed on the Romulans having an advanced cloaking device…" He waited for them to all confirm his statement, "Good. Except, it's not the Romulans, it's humans with Suliban tech. It's a group that calls themselves The Redux. From what we gathered, they're just a rehash of Terra Prime and it looks like they are itching for a fight."
Good old Terra Prime, Jamie often wondered how these people just don't die. For all their anti-alien rhetoric, they used a whole lot of alien tech. This Redux group seemed to be just as close-minded. Terra Prime was a xenophobic group that tried to get all non-humans out of the Sol system and away from earth. They went so far as to steal the DNA of Trip and T'Pol, the Vulcan science officer on the NX-01, and created a baby.
"What do they want?" Jamie asked Trip.
"We aren't entirely sure, just that they hate anything that's not human."
"What do you need us for, you have a team?" Bones asked from next to her.
Jamie knew the answer, "Fresh faces. You don't infiltrate a terrorist group with people they've seen before." Trip motioned for her to continue, "You want me to go in. My parentage makes me the perfect candidate to join a group like that and my skills would make me an asset. I'd be hiding in plain sight."
Trip smiled, "Man, if Hoshi could see you now. All that crap she gave me for teaching you tactical awareness."
She smirked at the memory of one of those lessons, "Okay, open your eyes and tell me what you see." She looked around, "Trees, Trip, I see trees." He chuckled and shook his head, "Look beyond the trees. See the movement, smell the air, feel your surroundings and then tell me what you see." Jamie took a deep breath, "There's a bird over there." He nodded, "What else?" Jamie slowly looked around, "That movement over there is water. Wind is blowing the grass to the west. There's a bee on that flower." He smiled, "Not bad, J.T."
"Are we talking about letting Jim go undercover with a terrorist group?" Bones asked.
Trip laughed, "I think you know her well enough to know that you can't stop her from doing the right thing." Bones looked at her like he wanted to strangle her.
"You can't be serious," Bones groaned.
Pike looked at him, "McCoy, this is the job. She told you that you weren't gonna like it."
"Understatement of the century, it's bad enough we were conscripted but this is ridiculous," Bones said.
It was Uhura who proved to be the voice of logic, "We could've said no, Leonard. I don't like it but Jamie has the perfect skill set for something like this, Sulu too."
Trip nodded, "They're recruiting from Alpha Centauri, you in?"
Jamie chuckled, "Oh come on, Trip, this is me you're talking too. You know good and damn well that you didn't have to ask."
Uhura nodded, "I'm in and I bet Sulu would say yes, too." Jamie thought about it and Uhura was right, Sulu was quiet but that didn't mean he wasn't dangerous. Braxim, Gaila, Spock and Glorak couldn't go because they weren't human; neither could Scotty because someone had to keep the ship in one peace and Kelso and Chekov didn't have the skill or the heart for something like this. Jamie had to assume that Pike was out too, he was a Federation hero, people knew what he looked like.
"I'm going too," Bones told them.
Jamie looked at him, "You sure? This isn't gonna be a cakewalk."
He nodded, "I'm going where you go. Who else is gonna make sure you don't get yourself killed?"