Author's note:
I received a rather strongly worded note from a well-known ST:ENT writer, reminding me not to steal from other stories. Unless it has become possible to steal from your own stuff, I don't. Years ago I used to publish under a different name on here. Since in the last 7 years my life has changed quite dramatically, I thought it was only fitting to change to a new account as I still like some of my own ideas, but not always the overall style and tone of my old stories.
Episode 3 : Experto Crede
Silver Creek, Mississippi, Feb. 15th 2155
Charles Tucker jr had to do a double take. These things did not look like Starfleet shuttles, in fact they looked more like bog standard hover cars and they had not shown up on the proximity sensors. And they sure unloaded a lot of boxes. He continued his march across the lawn to greet their guests.
"Dad!"
"Welcome home, boy. You lot movin' in?" he asked while embroiled in a heavyweight hugging competition with his son on who could squeeze more air out of the other's lungs.
"More like a bus man's holiday, 'specially for Malcolm. Where's mom?"
"She's raidin' the farmer's market right now. Your message came a bit at short notice, and we're more of the carnivore types, as you remember."
"Damn, I shoulda written that Vulcans can eat sea food too."
"Don' tell ya mama that. She thinks she's found the perfect excuse to put me on veggie food for a couple o' days, and I want to let her have that little victory."
Trip chuckled and his father followed him to the round of introductions.
"Dad, this is Hoshi Sato, best linguist in the galaxy."
"Much obliged, ma'am."
Charles returned the young woman's smile. Damn, she sure had a beautiful smile.
"Malcom Reed, best security man you can find. Make every place safe as houses."
"Sir," the Brit said, and Charles returned the firm handshake.
"And this stunningly logical and beautiful creature is my wife, T'Pol."
Charles felt more than a little befuddled. Not only by the ton of bricks Trip had just dumped on him, but also because a Vulcan offered him her hand. He gently shook it and returned her nod. Then immediately turned to his prodigal son.
"Fer chrissake Trip, you came all the way out here to get y'all killed? You tied the knot and didn't invite your mama, let alone have her organize the wedd'n?"
"We're not yet legally married, pops, only Vulcan traditional style, sorta. But that's good enough for me. Mom will get her wedding, just not in the near future. As you might have noticed, we've got a bit of work on our hands."
"Well, boy, good luck tellin' her all that before she's got you bent over the knee and started the paddlin'. Come in kids, let make this blockhead's last 30 minutes as comfy as we can."
-=/\=-
Hoshi couldn't hold it in any longer and started giggling like a school girl. She was following the men in, at a bit of a distance, with T'Pol walking beside her.
"You find this amusing?" T'Pol asked and Hoshi could clearly hear that T'Pol was confused.
"T'Pol, it's a figure of speech. His mother will not seriously assault him."
"Perhaps Trip should not have made it such a blunt statement. After all he has often criticized me for being too forthright in my speech."
"T'Pol, he's just too happy that you are his wife after all the two of you went through. He can't contain himself."
She exchanged a look with her friend and superior office. T'Pol seemed unsure of her answer.
"So he is eager to distribute this information because the fact of our bonding brings him great contentment?"
Hoshi chuckled. Only T'Pol could make romance sound like a scientific report.
"Yes."
"Hopefully he will be somewhat more skillful in relaying this fact to his mother. I would not wish to be the reason for tension."
"I think we're about to find out. There she comes," Hoshi said and pointed at the ground car that just pulled into the driveway.
-=/\=-
They entered the dwelling just in time for T'Pol to witness that her mate's maternal ancestor was just as adept as her husband at turning the display of affection into a competition at suffocating each other. However, the gesture appeared to come to a premature end when her mate's mother held him at arms length and eyed him suspiciously.
"Charles Anthony Tucker III. There is something you're not telling me. Out with it!" she demanded.
"Mom,TP'olandIaremarriedbutonlyVulcanstyleandnotyetlegallyandyougettoorganizeourweddingwhenwemakeitalllegal."
"Well, that was quick,"
T'Pol immediately agreed with the dry assessment of her mate's father. She doubted that his mother had really understood everything, but she was clearly aware that it involved her, as the human female was now on an intercept course and T'Pol braced herself for the semi-violent greeting she had experienced from a distance twice that day.
Fortunately though the human seemed to remember her manners and left it at a hand shake.
"That's lovely news, my dear. Welcome to our house. And sure you can help me make some sense of that word salad the boy just belched out?"
"I shall do my best to be of assistance," T'Pol replied dryly.
-=/\=-
It had gone dark, but the four officers were still sitting around the campfire in the garden. After years in close confines it was a welcome throwback to their younger years. Only Malcolm was still a bit doubtful, perhaps because he was probably in the best position to know that they wouldn't exactly be playing Robbers & Rozzers the next few days. There were some ugly decisions on the horizon.
"Trip, do you think it was a good idea to come here?" he asked. "We'd put your parents right into the cross hairs if someone finds out where we are."
"Don't worry about my folks, Malcolm. Dad is good enough at shooting to make your team and we deliberately didn't make it a full-fledged family reunion. And they still have the panic room. One of the results of having their first home burned off the face of the planet."
"Besides, I think your mother would notice any intruders before we did," T'Pol added drawing all looks to herself. "I am by now convinced that she must possess substantial latent telepathic abilities, which would not only explain why Trip and I could develop a tel, but also why both her mate and son are almost completely unable to keep anything from her."
"And why I had that strange little buzzing in my mind when I shook hands with her," Hoshi said. "I definitely have some telepathic abilities. It's why I can learn languages so fast."
"What is our official excuse anyway? We had the transponders off on the cars when we got here, so I guess Starfleet thinks we're somewhere else?" Trip asked, and stoked the remaining fire with a stick.
"Officially we're all in the Vulcan embassy," Malcolm explained. "Trip and T'Pol because they are being debriefed on their stay on Vulcan. Hoshi to help with the Kir'Shara again and I'm taking Suus Mahna lessons as part of a group of officers invited to do so by First Minister T'Pau. That last one is actually true, just that I'm not actually physically in that group, obviously."
"It would appear you do expect someone to look for us," T'Pol noted with a raised eyebrow of curiosity. Having us all ostensibly in the consulate would have any intruder walk straight into Vulcan custody."
"Unless the embassy staff has already been infiltrated by the Romulans too."
"We'll find that out in due time," Malcolm said. "T'Pol and I will visit an old 'friend' tomorrow who'll have the fingerprint analyzed that we found on the data chip. By the way how clumsily it was left, I would say your mystery visitor wanted you to find it, but at the same time have the plausible deniability to analyze it away from Starfleet's eyes. So what will we find, T'Pol?"
"We do hope to find minute differences that would allow us to tell Vulcan from Romulan DNA. But if he is who he claims to be, we will also find that he is my father."
"Blimey," Malcolm said, ignoring Hoshi's gasp. "No wonder you want to keep Starfleet out of it. If that becomes public knowledge, the coalition is shot."
"Indeed," T'Pol agreed.
"How do you want to give Starfleet and Vulcan a way to sniff out Romulan DNA without them wanting to know how you came to the knowledge, or whom the sample belonged to?"
"The hope is to find one or more nucleoid chains that are unique to Romulans. By claiming that we happened upon some organic residue with incomplete DNA we can plausibly omit that the reference sample was Vulcan DNA"
"You're walking quite a tightrope there," Hoshi noted.
"It's the only way to do it," Trip said. "What's she supposed to do, say that her dad's a Romulan? The coalition would be over because everyone would distrust the Vulcans and T'Pol would end up in a penal colony. When he has defected and actually delivered really valuable information, things will look different."
"Let's hope so," Malcolm agreed.
-=/\=-
"You wanted to see me?" Jonathan Archer asked as he strode into Admiral Gardner's temporary office.
"There was a change of plans," Gardner replied. "You'll lose your entire senior bridge crew."
"Sure, why not? Put it to me gently, Richard!"
The Captain jumped up and angrily paced the room.
"Sit down, Jon," Gardner ordered and waited for the Captain to calm down.
"You haven't joined Starfleet yesterday, you know bloody well that people don't stay on the same ship for years. You made a stink yourself about us taking too much time to promote them. If we're really heading into a war, we can't afford to have the only people with extended deep-space experience all on the same ship."
"You're right," Jonathan sighed. "But that doesn't mean I have to like it."
"Neither do I. Nobody wants to break up a crew that has galvanized so well. But your officers are needed elsewhere."
"Where are they going?" the captain asked, secretly hoping he would at least see some of them from time to time.
"Mayweather will become chief pilot. That man can fly an NX Ship like a shuttle. We want more pilots with that kind of skills."
"He will become a glorified flight instructor?" Jon asked, not sure about such an apparent waste of Travis's talents.
"Jon, right now even the Vulcans are building NX class ships, because we have only two of them and didn't plan to add a third one before a year from now. We don't have bridge crews and we sure as hell have no pilots who can fly one through a debris field without running head-first into the next obstacle. He'll be a 'glorified flight instructor' twenty-four-seven."
"And the others?"
"Tucker is the best engineer in Starfleet, T'Pol the best scientist, Reed is best at blowing stuff up and nobody is better at programming than Sato. Those four will design our dedicated war ship and then fly two of them with T'Pol and Reed as captains."
"Designing a war ship can take years," Jon said. "Not sure we have that long."
"We're not starting from scratch. We have over 200 old Cherokee class frigates either still active or in mothballs. We plan to modernize them and stuff them so full of weapons that they're little more than all teeth and claws with a bit of hull in between.
Tucker's main job will be to miniaturize the warp 5 engine and modify the hulls to withstand the higher speed."
"Guess I better get a head start on hunting down some replacements for my crew. Something tells me the selection at BuPers will soon be very limited with so many new ships," Jonathan mused, with a hint of sarcasm.
"Tell me about it," Gardner replied. "If we had the time I'd say put free porn on TV and wait for people to pump out babies, but we don't have that luxury. I already have one replacement for you. Know that guy?"
John took the PADD that Gardner had pushed his way and grinned. "Shran? You want to put him under my command?"
"For a while," the Admiral confirmed with a nod. "The Andorians wanted to park him behind a desk, because he lost his ship."
"Last time we saw each other he told me he'd probably not get another ship."
"Normally he would even be discharged," Gardner explained. "But considering his role in making peace between his people and all neighboring ones, the Imperial Council didn't dare to do so, so they wanted to make him a General and hide him away on some tedious desk job."
"Obviously it didn't meet his approval," Jon stated the, well, obvious.
"We can't commission him yet. We're still negotiating a way to that without stepping on too many toes in the Imperial Guard, so for the time being he'll be a military attache of the Andorian Embassy filling the role of First Officer. Similar to the arrangement we had with T'Pol in the early days of your mission."
"Still three officers to go," the Captain replied with a sigh and stood up to go.
-=/\=-
"These surroundings remind me of those movies Trip is so fond of," T'Pol remarked.
Malcolm looked at the cliched surroundings, a dark ally in the rain and rolled his eyes.
"Harris always had a flair for kitsch," he remarked dryly.
"Do I hear my name spoken in vain?" a voice from behind the said and they turned around.
Of course the man was clad in his usual leather jacket, looking more like a failed James Bond villain than an operative.
"Here's the sample," Malcolm said without so much as a greeting and handed Harris the vial with what little DNA material they had managed to retrieve from the chip, and then the chip itself, or more precisely a translated copy of it. They had kept the Romulan chip to themselves.
"I suppose you already know what's on it," Harris remarked.
Malcolm nodded. "We will work from the top down, so we'll start on the Turnbull fellow. This will draw the Starfleet mole out of the woodwork, if nothing else because he will panic when the head honcho is gone. Have Falkner meet me in two days at the usual place."
"Art doesn't work for us anymore," Harris said. "He walked out at the same time as you."
"Don't insult my intelligence," Malcolm said. "I know you bloody well enough. Since Falks and I walked you've been left with a rump team that's as much use as an arsehole with taste buds. You'll do the same as you did with me. You'll call in a few favors. And now it's probably better to stop wasting time. You'll have your hands full to get this analyzed within two days. Falks will find the file with our usual cipher, which you by the way don't know."
"You've changed, Malcolm. Two days then."
"Why thank you, Captain Obvious."
-=/\=-
"Was this confrontational behavior necessary?" T'Pol asked as they walked away from their short meeting. "And what was my reason of being here?"
"Harris is basically an impostor," Malcom explained. "He makes himself out to be the big spy, but in reality he's nothing without a good team and he lost that when Falkner and I walked out on him. As for you being here. I wanted some backup muscle in case he was not willing to be 'cooperative'."
"You expected him not to help us?"
"Oh, he would help us just fine, but there was a good chance that he would use the occasion to state my return to the section as a price."
"In which case my services would have become necessary?" T'Pol asked dryly and Malcolm grinned.
"Not really, T'Pol, you being there was all we needed. For all his bluster, Harris is afraid of Vulcans, ever since he was knocked on his arse by a Vulcan female who was quite a bit smaller than him."
"How could he gain such a high posting if he was not an adept fighter?" she asked for clarification.
Malcolm shrugged. "Seniority, that simple. The only thing he was always good at was getting himself on the easy missions. While good men ended up as dinner in the Gorn hegemony or were executed on some god forsaken planet, he soon had a lot of minor but successful missions in his files that could just as well have been finished by the boy scouts."
"Why did you and the contact you requested leave?"
"Because of Harris. We had basically become his pet assassins. We hardly got any actual undercover missions anymore. We went in somewhere offed someone and back out. That's the mission type he was used to. God knows how often we could have gotten some valuable information or planted some false tracks before doing the dirty work."
"So you expect we will have to revert to assassination during this assignment?"
"No," Malcolm said and shook his head. "I wouldn't want to put either of you through that. Don't get me wrong, if given a good enough reason I will kill someone and not lose a wink of sleep over it. That's the side of humanity we're not necessarily proud of, but neither you, Trip or Hoshi have that mindset and neigther should you have."
"Thank you, Malcolm."
"We might have to help people have an accident, though. You've seen the files. If that mole in Starfleet is someone from the top brass, there's no way we can let that become public knowledge. The coalition would be over the next day. It is brittle enough as it is."
"Agreed."
